The vision and goal of Axel Health have long been to streamline and enhance the operations and planning of healthcare services. This goal took a significant leap forward in the summer of 2024 when we acquired the shares of Finnish company Unitary Healthcare Oy. But what does this mean in practice for healthcare professionals – both in Finland and Sweden?

Patient transfers refer to situations where a patient is moved from one healthcare unit to another, for example, from one hospital to another or to a long-term care facility. These transfers are an essential part of healthcare workflow, and their success significantly impacts patient safety and the quality of care. While patient transfers might seem straightforward – find an available location and arrange transportation – in practice, the process is often much more complicated and stressful. In this blog, we delve into the challenges that can arise during patient transfers and how Uoma makes them smoother and safer.

In the social and healthcare sector, personnel costs account for the largest expense, ranging from approximately 30-60% of the total costs, depending on the responsibility area. The shortage of frontline professionals, such as doctors, nurses, and therapists, poses challenges to improving cost efficiency. At the same time, automating administrative tasks offers significant cost-saving opportunities without increasing the workload of frontline staff.

As we explore cost-saving strategies in the healthcare sector, it's crucial to recognize the role of digital technology in revolutionizing patient care and operational efficiency. Digital transformation in healthcare isn't just about cost reduction—it's about improving patient experience and making healthcare operations more efficient and patient-centered.

Digital door displays have become increasingly popular in conference rooms over the past decade. These displays make it easy to see when and for whom a room is booked, and making new room bookings is a breeze. Did you know that similar door displays are also used in healthcare, especially in outpatient settings? In healthcare settings, digital door displays provide a variety of benefits, and I will explore four key benefits in more detail:

Patient fees can be a complex matter, no matter whether you're dealing with a private or public healthcare provider. These fees typically include both statutory and provider-specific charges, often capped at certain maximum limits. Payments may be collected entirely from the patients or partially covered by Kela (the Social Insurance Institution of Finland), insurance companies, or other entities.

In the modern healthcare sector, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a pivotal role in transforming various aspects, from clinical procedures to population health management and diagnostics. One of the key advantages of AI is its capacity to improve administrative efficiency. By automating routine tasks, AI technologies free up healthcare professionals to focus on more critical aspects of patient care.

Public healthcare funding is facing challenges. In Finland, the Act on funding of wellbeing services counties makes the situation even more complicated for wellbeing services counties. In Sweden, inflation and rising interest rates have forced even the esteemed Karolinska Hospital to adjust its staff. Now is the time to cut costs, but how can it be done without compromising the quality of care? And how can Axel help healthcare organizations save even more?

In Sweden, the digital transformation of healthcare is gaining momentum, and patient flow management is a common denominator among the regional councils’ priorities. As healthcare organizations modernize their core systems, the tendering process for patient management can seem daunting. We’ve put together this short checklist that simplifies your journey, steering your organization towards a solution that not only boosts operational efficiency but also significantly improves patient experience.

Automation and digitalization bring remarkable benefits and improvements to emergency services. They're not just elevating patient experiences and optimizing workflows but also saving invaluable time and resources. Can these advancements also contribute to crafting precise reports that push operational efficiency even further?

Automation in hospital emergency departments brings significant benefits to both patients and healthcare professionals. However, these benefits are not limited to triage. Automation also provides significant advantages in the processes that follow this initial evaluation. In this blog post, I continue from my previous write-up on automating the check-in processes in emergency departments, and we delve more into how automation can streamline operations and improve patient experience post-triage.

Emergency units in hospitals are often busy and chaotic environments where patients require prompt attention for a wide range of medical conditions. One of the most critical parts of the emergency care process is the check-in process, which involves collecting patient information, assessing the severity of their condition, and prioritizing treatment based on urgency. However, the check-in process can be time-consuming, leading to longer wait times for patients and increased workload for hospital staff. In this blog post, we will explore how automating the check-in process can help emergency units improve efficiency and enhance the patient experience.

In many countries, healthcare organizations have hard times ahead because of the issues in their current healthcare systems. In Finland, there are significant problems in the overall patient flow management, which is painfully visible, for example, in joint emergency departments. According to the statistics of the Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare (THL), emergency department visits in primary healthcare and joint emergency departments have increased by 10.1% and at the same time, the number of long-term clients in health centers has grown by over 21% from 2019 to 2021. These problems have a horizontal impact on the entire treatment chain from access to primary healthcare to finding follow-up treatment. 

Finland seeks to solve these problems by regulation. The treatment time guarantee will change in September 2023 when the waiting time will be reduced to 14 days and at the end of 2024 it will be reduced to 7 days. Access to primary healthcare plays a crucial role in solving the challenges of emergency departments, but it’s equally important to ensure patients’ smooth access to follow-up treatment to reduce the pressure on the overloaded emergency services. 

Do you know what computers are good at? Computing. Do you know what optimization is? A mathematical problem. 

Healthcare service production requires careful planning, and the larger the unit sizes become, the larger is the planning effort required. What does it take to produce efficient healthcare services? In simple terms, patients and professionals need to encounter in the same location – and this location also needs to offer the equipment and materials required, no matter if they’re related to diagnostics, care, or medication.

Mentally, a patient's path begins already at home, when they receive an appointment reminder or an invitation letter from their healthcare provider. Physically, it starts when the patient arrives at the health center or at the hospital. The first thing that the patient usually encounters is a self check-in kiosk. Developing, delivering, and especially programming of such devices is routine work for us at Axel Health, so I decided to write a short blog post on the key ingredients of designing and implementing a great user experience for a self-service kiosk. 

Almost on a daily basis, we get to read about failed healthcare IT projects in various media. The problem is global. However, the actual software solution provider may not always be the one to blame ‒  instead, the reason may lie in the fact that the healthcare organization doesn’t really know what it is acquiring.

Shift.xlsx, annual plan.xls, resource planning Excel, mighty Excel, smart Excel... The world revolves around spreadsheets. These magical inventions are the primary planning tools in almost every organization. Why? Let’s take a closer look at where Excel works well, and the areas where it’s about time to give up using it for efficient healthcare resource management.

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about the benefits of patient flow management in terms of numbers. In part 1, I focused on the benefits of self service at the front desk and in part 2 I discussed the benefits from the healthcare units' perspective.

In healthcare, one of the biggest challenges has always been the organization of diagnostics and treatment of contagious diseases in hospitals and health centers. It’s effective to focus complex healthcare actions requiring a lot of professionals and equipment under one roof. At the same time, because of this way of organizing, a large number of people having an infectious disease, such as influenza or Covid-19, may be sitting in the same waiting room. In that room, one patient can expose many other people to the disease, although a health center should be a place to seek cure for illnesses, not the other way around.

Patient experience describes an individual’s experience of their issue, whether it is an illness or an accident, and how healthcare treats that problem. Over the past ten years, many organizations have launched and completed projects to improve the overall patient experience.

In my previous blog post, I introduced you to the benefits of self service at the front desk, where patients check in, fill out their patient history forms, and pay their invoices. This time, I’ll focus on improving the efficiency of healthcare processes by reducing idle time - and on explaining the calculations involved.

What are the key reasons for our customers to implement Axel? The answer is divided in two - for the soft and hard benefits our solution offers. Common soft benefits include improving the patient experience, modernizing the user experience, or increasing operational transparency. Today, however, we are diving into the world of hard benefits – including numbers, spreadsheets, and euros.

After being stuck at our homes for the first half of the year avoiding human contact, we’ve all experienced a growing need to be in physical contact with each other. During the hot summer days, beaches, restaurants and nightclubs have been filled with happy people. Mentally, the summer has been good for many of us but the contact with other people has had a negative impact on the management of the corona pandemic.

In many healthcare organizations, self check-in to appointments has become a daily routine. Self check-in has clear advantages – it saves healthcare resources from being tied to support-related tasks. Instead, healthcare personnel can focus on more meaningful work.

Excel is used for various purposes in business processes all around the world. This classic solution is very flexible, but it can also become an extremely tedious tool to use – at the latest when the company grows. In many healthcare organizations, resource planning is usually run on Excel. Is this really the most efficient way to do this important planning work or would there be other options?

The idea of digitalization, automation, and self-service solutions is to reduce employees' workload and routine tasks and to allow them to focus on more meaningful work. Especially in the healthcare sector, there is a clear need for automation - the main task of healthcare professionals is to care for patients and to spend as little time as possible on non-essential bureaucracy and paperwork.