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Main article: Finland
Digitalization
2019: Recipes in electronic form only
By mid-2019, digital technologies in the Finnish health care system had achieved a high degree of development. For example, all recipes in the country are electronic, and paper is allowed only in exceptional cases, for example, when power is cut.
Finland became one of the first countries in Europe to systematically introduce electronic prescriptions in 2010. Recent data show that Finnish doctors issue about 30 million digital prescriptions annually. By 2022, digital prescriptions will be complemented by a national drug list that will be open to all patients. It will list all drugs taken by the patient, which will simplify the control of prescriptions.
2016: Start of development of Finland's Unified Healthcare IT System
Main article: Finland's Unified Healthcare IT System
2013: Launch of the National Patient Data Warehouse and My Kanta Portal
In 2013, the National Patient Data Repository was commissioned. It collects medical documents of all hospitals and outpatient clinics, and this data is available to both medical professionals and the patients themselves. In 2018, it was supplemented by a data warehouse for social services.
Thanks to the storage of digital data, Finnish citizens have the opportunity to transfer medical certificates necessary for obtaining a driver's license directly from one department to another. Another new service using patient data storage is the image processing structure. Patients access individual digital data through the My Kanta portal, which has become very popular in Finland. By 2019, about 50% of all citizens aged 18 to 65 have gained access to personal medical data on the portal, and even 37% of elderly citizens check their medical data online. These numbers are much higher than in other European countries[1]