Proactive healthcare

Ten percent of Finland's population generates 80 percent of the nation's health and social care costs. This fact is behind a new effort to use predictive algorithms to compare "pseudonymised" patient data with a set of rules based on medical guidance to recommend treatments before people become ill. One trial involved checking to patients taking a central nervous system medication to ensure they were were being regularly seen by a doctor. Another targeted high-risk patients with high blood pressure for medication that could reduce heart attacks and strokes.

The program operates in a difficult regulatory nexus—between the GDPR that restricts use of personally-identifiable data, and Finland’s Health Care Act, which demands that local governments take aggressive actions to monitor and intervene to improve residents' health. This signal shows that municipal health authorities will be able to deploy solutions that balance the need and risks of targeted health care interventions, with the potential for rapid gains in well-being and cost reductions for critical care.