Analyysi sähköisistä potilaskertomuksista Suomen julkisessa terveydenhuollossa

The importance of healthcare information systems has emerged in recent years, leading medical professionals to spend a lot of their time with them, yet their user experience and statistics have not improved much over the years. Meanwhile Finland has undergone extensive public healthcare reform, leaving decision-makers without recent research on how to optimise the current systems in the new setup. This research explores how Finnish public sector electronic health records (EHRs) can be optimised considering system selection, number of systems, and system development. The research was done combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, allowing for room to comprehensively consider both of the welfare regions and user’ perspectives and analyse the potential optimisation areas. The qualitative approach consists of 15 semi-structured interviews of welfare region information technology leaders while the quantitative approach consists of the Finnish medical association’s questionnaire in regard to doctor’s experience of EHRs. By leveraging the thematic analysis, this research identifies three key themes that provide a holistic and broad view on EHR optimisation possibilities, while it also provides an understanding of the similarities and differences in welfare region and user perspectives. This research identifies and examines the most important factors such as usability and interoperability as the key themes to optimise Finnish public sector EHRs. It also discusses the upsides and downsides of adopting a centralised system in Finnish public healthcare. Furthermore, it provides the practical implications of optimisation to enhance medical professionals’ productivity, satisfaction as well as patient care and patient safety, allowing relevant stakeholders access data-driven support in their decision-making. Lastly, it outlines directions for future research to account for the limitations of this research.