MISIK- Hack the Healthcare

Inspiration

How to help the public healthcare and social services become more efficient, user-friendly and cost-effective in a competitive situation? How can the public healthcare provider satisfy the changing expectations of the users?

These were the main questions we started to consider, when we thought about how the public sector should develop if the new healthcare and social services reform shall take place in the future. The approach we chose was, how the public sector could tackle the heavy traffic of customers in a user-friendly way. If the amount of "unnecessary appointments" could be decreased, it would save money and time i.e. make the public healthcare system more efficient.

Since we are designing a service, we want to concentrate on the user. In our solution, one main factor is going to a mindset where the patient is truly a customer, such as on the private sector. We have chosen parents as our target group. Parents often face a situation, that their child is ill but it's not clear if it's necessary to see a doctor or not. Although, we have now concentrated on parents, the solution would be easily scaled, e.g. to youngster’s mental health service.

What it does

Our solution is a web-application in which you can determine whether you can treat an illness by yourself or if you should go to see a healthcare professional. You log in to the system with your banking information and the system can then use your medical history (Omakanta). This way we can provide personlized service.

First, the customer answers to a survey. Based on the answers the system suggests you either information on the illness and how to treat it or it suggests that you should contact a healthcare professional through a live chat. As a source the survey uses reliable information sources such as Terveyskirjasto. The idea is that the survey would exploit Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. The system would remember, what the user has answered before when he/she has used the service and exploit that data. It also compares the results to other users' answers and results. By time, the survey would develop to be more accurate.

In the live chat the healthcare professional can consult you about your issue. Live chat provides you an option to use text-based, video or voice messaging. If you decide that you want to book an appointment, you can book it in the chat. Based on your location, the chat provides you information about the closets hospitals and healthcare centers and it shows their rush hours. It also shows the live queue to emergency care, which is useful in case you need to go to emergency care. It is though important to understand, that this channel is not for diagnosing but for making risk assessment.

How we built it

• we defined the problem
• we chose one part that caused the problem and focus on that
• we developed a service that would tackle that problem and created the service in a user-centered way
• we changed the mindset in a way that users wouldn't be seen as "trouble" but as customers that want to be taken care of

Challenges we ran into

It was a challenge to find out, what's the target group. In the big picture the target group is everyone with an illness (or actually everyone, if we are considering preventive healthcare), but we need to segment that group in a better way. We also find it hard to understand, what the assignment provider really wanted from the solution. The assignment topic was quite broad and general, and it was a bit hard to find out the core of the assignment. It was a shame that we had so little time to discuss about the topic with the mentors and get mentoring. If we would've had more time we probably could've asked the right questions, so we could've really find the biggest weak spots.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• we were able to develop further an existing service (Minunterveyteni.fi) by making it truly user-centered
• realising the difficulties public sector will face, if the new reform takes place
• creating a believable scenario of a healthcare service
• carrying the project out on time

What we learned

• we learned to create new and develop old services by using user-centered design thinking
• we learned to understand better the current situation of the public healthcare and social services, its strengths and weaknesses, and the situation after the healthcare and social services reform
• we gained understanding on, how the public services should be developed further so that it could thrive in the changing environment
• we gained experience on working in a multidisciplinary team

What's next for MISIK- Hack the Healthcare

Our project could be easily a adapted to the existing system Minunterveyteni.fi by the City of Hämeenlinna. The system could be improved in many ways according to our project and suggestions. It would be also possible to scale the idea and use it for example with helping young people with mental health problems.