Terveystalo: How Digital Investment Built Finland's Healthcare Market Leader
Almost ten years, one continuous development partnership, and a digital front door that now defines how patients experience Finland's largest healthcare company.
Terveystalo is Finland's largest healthcare company. It provides primary healthcare and specialist care services to corporate, private, and public sector clients. Tietotalo is Terveystalo's long-term digital services development partner, and has been developing Terveystalo's digital services for almost ten years.
The solution: a connected ecosystem, not a single project
Across almost a decade, Tietotalo has worked as a dedicated development team inside a continuous development model rather than delivering a single one-off project. The work has spanned service design and UX design, cloud services, and DevOps, with two flagship outcomes standing out: the OmaTerveys patient service, and the renewed online appointment booking platform.
- 10 years of close partnership
- A dedicated development team
- Continuous development rather than project-by-project delivery
- Service design and user experience (UX) design
- Cloud services and DevOps
OmaTerveys: health information in one place, direct contact with experts
Customers today expect service exactly when and where their need arises. Terveystalo's OmaTerveys service was designed and developed by Tietotalo to meet that expectation, giving customers an easy way to find information related to their own health status and service descriptions. Customers log in using strong authentication, either online banking codes or a mobile certificate, and parents can link their own profile to a child's profile to handle matters on the child's behalf.
A key part of OmaTerveys is its chat service, available to private and occupational health clients around the clock. Customers can reach their doctor when it suits them, rather than waiting for a callback or queuing for an appointment, and Terveystalo's experts respond quickly, with payment for the service handled electronically through the OmaTerveys mobile payment feature.
The Message a Specialist function within OmaTerveys lets occupational healthcare customers stay in immediate contact with their own occupational health team by message, anywhere, anytime. It streamlines contact for non-urgent matters such as reviewing test results, vaccination counselling, or renewing a prescription, complementing Terveystalo's broader set of remote services that are independent of time and place.
- Patient information system integration
- Episerver content management system customisation
- Remote services and Message a Specialist functionality
- Multichannel communication and permissions handling
- Strong authentication and security
Online appointment booking: the cornerstone of the digital service path
Making an appointment online is a key part of a healthcare customer's service path and referral to treatment, so Tietotalo renewed Terveystalo's online appointment booking system to make it more user-friendly and intelligent. Transparency, data protection, and reliability all matter intensely here: a customer booking a healthcare appointment may be exhausted by illness, or carry feelings of fear or shame about visiting a professional, which means the system has to be unusually clear, trustworthy, and able to guide the customer smoothly along their path.
- Design and implementation of the logic layer of the appointment platform
- Deployment and configuration of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform
- User interface programming for web and mobile
The architecture behind the booking experience
Tietotalo designed and implemented Terveystalo's online appointment booking system and its related interfaces. The background service handles the healthcare system's services and available appointments, along with specialists' information, and serves all of it through the software's interface to both the online appointment service and the mobile app. The same background system enriches specialists' information with the professionals' own descriptions and price lists.
The online appointment booking system runs on and is monitored through the Microsoft Azure cloud service, which enables intelligent scaling of capacity and the use of proactive analytics to find and resolve potential error situations before they are ever realised by a patient trying to book care.
Why it matters
Terveystalo's systematic investment in digital services has improved its customer experience, strengthened the company's market position, and helped make it the leader in its field. The combination of an always-available OmaTerveys service and a trustworthy, fast online booking path means digital channels are not a side feature of Terveystalo's offering, they are increasingly the primary way patients experience the company at all, which is precisely why a decade-long, continuously developed partnership rather than a single project was the right model.