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When digitalisation meets health, Spinverse helps to close the gap

January 20, 2020

Digitalisation is expected to bring major benefits in health care, both as effective health care solutions and in cost savings. Finland is investing significantly in R&D of both fields to become the world leader in health tech in the upcoming years. CleverHealth Network is an innovation ecosystem where Helsinki University Hospital (HUS) and a group of prominent Finnish technology companies use health care data to develop together better health care solutions for Finns and successful export products for the companies. Spinverse facilitates the ecosystem, acting as a key driver for these new innovations in health tech.

HUS has collected an extensive pool of health care data since the 1950s and it continues to grow every day. The CleverHealth Network ecosystem leverages the extensive and internationally unique Finnish health and well-being data in its innovation activities. In the first projects of the ecosystem, the HUS data lake can be used as training data for algorithms developed e.g. to monitor gestational diabetes in early phase, to identify different types of cancer, in diagnostics of rare diseases or to assist physicians in analysing brain disorders using medical imaging. For instance, a mobile application measuring and storing the health-related data of pregnant women suffering from gestational diabetes is under development in one of the projects, while another project identifies patients suitable for home dialysis and develops a holistic application making home dialysis easy and problem free both for patients and health care professionals.

“CleverHealth Network has taken the brave challenge to develop new world-class health care solutions for critical medical problems widely utilising the health and wellbeing data. Our role is to facilitate the intensive joint R&D work of top-notch clinicians, data scientists and key experts from a variety of MedTech companies and boost the work from well-defined research problems towards business with real impact,” says Markku Heino, Principal Consultant and Ecosystem Leader at Spinverse.

Multidisciplinary cooperation aims at substantial savings in health care expenditure

Unique to Finland, the technological and legislative prerequisites for developing technological solutions to health and wellbeing challenges are already in place, which is a valuable aspect in making progress in the health tech innovations.

According to Visa Honkanen, Chief Digital Officer at HUS, clinicians working together may sometimes be tempted to get engrossed in basic research even though the primary target is to develop clinical tools. In CleverHealth Network projects, HUS contributes to the ecosystem with their deep clinical expertise and extensive data, while the partner companies bring expertise on needed technologies and drive towards business. In fact, the ecosystem has set a target to have practical applications ready within two years, which can be considered a good pace in the medical field.

Honkanen says that artificial intelligence has proven most feasible for clarifying matters at the early stage of the treatment, which is where the biggest economical savings can be achieved. Even quite light-weight yet intelligent technology may lead up to 30 per cent savings in the total costs related to a treatment of a medical problem.

Spinverse strengthens its position as a driver for health tech innovation

Spinverse is gaining momentum in the constantly growing health tech industry. In addition to facilitating the CleverHealth Network ecosystem and over ten years of solid expertise in building need-driven innovation projects in health and medical field, Spinverse has recently been selected as Business Finland’s programme partner in two large health programmes, Smart Life Finland and Personalised Health. The aim of the Smart Life Finland programme is to promote personal, real-time and intelligent health and wellbeing solutions, whereas Personalised Health programme enforces Business Finland´s goal to make Finland a pioneer in the personalized healthcare field.

As the programme partner of Business Finland, Spinverse will, among other things, facilitate in building internationalisation services for a group of companies and identify potential new actors to join the programmes’ activities. “Our expertise will also come to good use in mapping potential new ecosystems and identifying joint offerings for exports. Large international customers won’t necessarily be interested in individual Finnish companies, but we will get their attention through joint offerings,” Riikka Paasikivi, Senior Consultant at Spinverse says.

Large pharmaceutical and medtech companies are targeted as potential investors in Finland. This can be expected because of Finland’s abundance of world-class research. “We have university hospitals, biobanks and centres of excellence such as the National Cancer Center, Neurocenter Finland and the upcoming National Genome Center. Combined with comprehensive data registries and an advanced digital and legislative environment, Finland is the perfect place for health-related investments, ” Paasikivi adds.

For more information on CleverHealth Network, contact Markku Heino (markku.heino@spinverse.com, +358 40 719 1221)
For more information on Business Finland’s Smart Life Finland and Personalised Health programmes, contact Riikka Paasikivi (riikka.paasikivi@spinverse.com, +358 50 521 5944)