Bringing your digital healthcare solution to international markets - easy as pie, or is it?

“Born Global” is a valid principle to base your company and business on from the very beginning.?That’s what the software industry building on top of mobile technologies has taught us. And agreeably, this is a sound choice in many respects. In Health and Wellbeing category, there are already over 360 000 mobile solutions available. For example, in Central Europe, new regulations are under work to ensure the safety of the growing use of mobile solutions in healthcare – but also to enable new types of business around it. Something to notice from the start of your project: there are often many stumbling blocks on the road in bringing a smartphone or a tablet application into use and to the international market.

The new Client Data Act that came into force last autumn creates new opportunities to develop solutions that take advantage of healthcare data. One of the sources of Finnish pride and joy in the international arenas, the My Kanta service of the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, Kela, will be nudged forward during 2022 despite some of its shortcomings.

At the moment, there are only a handful of applications that utilize My Kanta Personal Health Record (Kanta PHR). This number is expected to grow as with the approval of the user, health- and wellbeing applications will be able to store data, which the user is monitoring and has measured herself. This data can then be used by healthcare professionals, for example, at a doctor’s appointment and the data can be included as part of your medical history.

Also the opposite, extracting data from Kanta PHR, will be possible, as new types of wellbeing applications will be able to retrieve data, for example, of your medication or chronic illnesses – with your acceptance, of course.

FinData was established a couple of years ago along with the law concerning the secondary use of health and social data. Its main task is to provide companies and organizations with secure information sources for secondary use of health data that is collected to national social-, healthcare- and other relevant registries. The objective is to facilitate research, education, and innovation activities and to bring about new solutions for leading with data. Once we get this process up and running, new innovative solutions can start flooding into the market.

Imagine, for example, an app that enables a tourist traveling to the Olympics in Beijing to take all her health data with her and with a click of a button, to translate that data into a format a local healthcare professional can understand.

For applications, and for medical devices as well, communicating with different Healthcare information systems is a demanding and precise process and requires a common set of rules. Luckily, we have had the HL7 standards and its FHIR interface in use for a long time. Currently, there’s a serious lack of experts in this field since many national and global players are swearing by the name of these standards, such as HUS, Apotti, KELA, Epic, or Intersystems, just to mention a few.

To get your promising health innovation to flourish, you need to consider certain steps of internationalization; the validation of the app, regulatory compliance as well as quality standards are part of these. Unfortunately, many Finnish health and wellbeing companies start their journey to global markets without having the clinical validation and certifications related to regulatory compliance in order.

One obstacle on the way is that Finnish hospitals, maybe apart from HUS, haven’t been very active in investing in enterprise cooperation to boost healthcare innovation activities. Also, compared to other Nordic countries, we do not have as many investors specific to this field of industry. And lastly, the EU funding instruments (Horizon 2020, EIC Pathfinder, etc.) are heavily competed for so you have to consider how much you can rely on them.

Often the fastest route to international markets is to find good partners. An investor, that isn’t in such a hurry to make an exit, a public, for example, Business Finland or EU based funding instrument to recognize the right focus on research, and finally, a skilled solution partner, that has all the needed services, such as the right technology expertise, and the right regulatory and quality management know-how. It may even prove to be easier to find the funding in the first place if you already have the right team with the right partners along in your project.

Do you have questions about digital healthcare solutions and internationalization? Check the Digious site and contact us, we are happy to help.

The author:

Ilkka R?s?nen, Business Development Director at Digious - Send a message