Getting to know healthcare ecosystem

This blog post is a summary of what we learned during 3 interesting events organized by HealthSPA. HealthSPA is an umbrella organization for health technology startups in Finland. If you want to know more about Upgraded Life Talks that are preceding Upgraded Life Festival then keep on reading! 

I was very happy to take part in the solution lab on improving the daily life of cancer patients. It was awesome how doctors and patients, startups, and public healthcare officials, corporate representatives, and industry talents all sat down together and shared their view on the common challenge we all want to solve.

I was able to talk about our project with Tuula Helander who is the development manager at the Comprehensive Cancer Center. We exchanged contacts and hopefully we can collaborate in the future, she saw great potential for that. 

Upgraded Life TALKS 3: Big Deal @ Helsinki Hub Maria 0-1 (Nov 24)

Some time ago we visited another event organized by HealthSPA with Anna and Riin. This time it was about the needs of massive public and private sector healthcare providers HUS and Mehiläinen.

Chief Innovation Officer Miikka Korja from HUS was talking about the concept of virtual hospital and it sounded very innovative. Miika Korja himself was so excited about the project that he was sure that most of the doctors will become Uber drivers as this virtual hospital will provide essential information and care for the patients with the primary aim being on prevention. He is rather safe himself as he is a neurosurgeon and no platform can replace that specialty. Afterward, eHealth Director Ossi Laukkanen from Mehiläinen was saying that they are constantly looking for new ideas and collaborators as they are becoming more and more digitally oriented.

This event brought together startups and big healthcare providers with the aim of helping startups to deliver their solutions to thousands of users. One successful collaboration story of a startup and HUS has definitely been Noona healthcare – the cancer clinic at your fingertips. Pasi Heiskanen from Noona healthcare was talking about their experiences in collaborating with a big corporation and he gave two tips: trust and patience are crucial when working with huge healthcare providers.

This was again an excellent meeting and we are already looking forward to the next event in February which is going to be about design in healthcare and wellbeing.

Upgraded Life TALKS vol. 4. Design in Health and Wellbeing @ Microsoft Flux (Feb 16)

This was the fourth event of the Upgraded Life TALKS series and it was about design in health and wellbeing. We attended the event with Anna and Riin to hear about the experiences of others in the field. We learned about the importance of good design when creating solutions with health benefits.

But more importantly, we were able to test out the Moodmetric ring (it’s a cool ring that measures stress) and we were able to conclude that it definitely works. Without going into detail, I should say that our results seemed surprisingly accurate.

Now we are eagerly waiting for Upgraded Life Festival which will take place in April 2017.