Torhola: Finnish Social and Health Care Systems should be built on top of the National Archive of Health Information

Last week Mr. Sipilä, the Prime Minister of Finland, called for united information architecture for the Finnish systems for social and health services. There has been a lot of speculative interpretations but on one thing we can all agree, according to Mr. Mika Torhola, the Managing Director of Atostek and expert in health care information systems.

– The information systems must share a common core, a national patient information system, says Mr. Torhola.

– There already is such a common core, the National Archive of Health Information known as the Kanta service. It contains the medical history of all Finnish citizens, continues Mr. Torhola.

– All Finnish social and health care organisations have access to Kanta services. Kanta is a state-of-the-art system in nationwide use. We must continue utilising and developing Kanta and build new services on top of it, claims Mr. Torhola.

– Such an integral architecture offers great advantages. There is no need to provide central coordination to the development of additional service components, and there is no need for direct interaction between all of those components. This enables seamless integration between all services, public and privat, explains Mr. Torhola.

Additional information:
Mr. Mika Torhola, Atostek Ltd, Finland, tel. +358 50 412 3453

Atostek is the leading Finnish company in developing electronic prescription and archiving systems independent from patient information systems, and one of the few audited Kanta agents.