Back to list

Back to list

Back to list

Back to list

Back to list

Baltic News Service (BNS) talked to Taavi Einaste on the subject of Finnish hospital procurement and published a news piece.

Nortal – the company created in the merger of the Estonian company Webmedia and the Finnish software developer CCC – will decide on its participation in the procurement of a new patient information system for the Hospital District of Helsinki only after the final conditions have been clarified. The estimated cost of the procurement is 350-450 million euros.

"It’s quite likely that if we decide to participate, we will do it together with another company whose skills and experience complement ours," commented Taavi Einaste, Head of the eHealth Business Unit at Nortal, in his interview with BNS.
 
A decision on participation in the procurement, also known as the Apotti project, is expected from the Hospital District of Helsinki (HUS), the cities of Helsinki, Vantaa, Kerava and Kauniainen, the municipality of Kirkkonummi and KL-Kuntahankinnat Oy, a local government joint procurement company representing municipalities outside HUS. They must all decide on their participation separately. Helsinki’s satellite city Espoo decided last month not to proceed, whereas the Helsinki City Council had already given its approval in December.

Until then, Nortal will continue to provide services for its first Finnish IT client, Labquality, and is in active negotiations with several smaller Finnish hospitals and medical laboratories. Work also continues with contacts in other countries, where Nortal also has operations.

"According to Nortal’s estimation, the architecture of the eHealth information system implemented by the Tartu University Hospital complies well with the needs of major Finnish hospitals,“ says Einaste.
 
"Over the past couple of years, we have introduced our system to over 50 healthcare and healthcare IT decision makers from Finland, including representatives of the Helsinki University Hospital.”

According to Einaste, Nortal’s IT systems have received an abundance of positive feedback: "Obviously, the Finnish health care system is different from that of Estonia, so a number of adjustments must be made to the software for it to comply with Finnish requirements.”

Einaste adds that it is difficult to predict when exactly the procurement of the new patient information system will take place, as last summer’s predictions of a possible launch date before the end of the year did not materialise.
 
"Based on the latest Information from Finland, the procurement is likely to be launched before summer but even this estimation may be too optimistic," says Einaste. "The entire procedure – from announcing the procurement to selecting the winning bidder may take at least six to nine months but even longer in case of disagreements. The expected time frame from concluding the contract to the delivery of the information system is three to four years."

"Our decision on whether to participate in the procurement, as well as our chances of being chosen as a winning bidder, largely depend on the procurement conditions. We assume that, at the moment of making a bid or concluding the contract, the software does not have to comply fully with the Finnish requirements.”

Einaste estimates that the bidder may be required to prove its capacity in Finland. “Fortunately, today Nortal is big enough both by general and by Finnish standards, so we should fulfill this requirement.”
 
He continues: “As for companies in Finland, this project is far too important for them to ignore. It is also large enough to attract the attention of global enterprises that normally do not show much interest in our region. Thus we can expect some tough competition.”
According to Einaste, Nortal’s possible advantage, compared to global enterprises, lies in the depth of its knowledge of how the Finnish market works, and in its ability to estimate the volume of work needed to fulfil Finnish requirements. "At the same time, the companies that have been actively involved in the Finnish health care system are more experienced than us. The successful bidder must provide a modern technological platform complying with all the requirements. We believe that this is where we can beat most of our competitors," he explains.
 
The procurement for the new patient information system will be carried out as a negotiated procedure. Three to six bids, which comply with the tender requirements, will be selected from those that have submitted applications to participate; the winning bidder will be chosen as a result of negotiations. The current annual expenses of patient information systems for local communes in the Helsinki District amount to approximately 49 million euros. According to the preparatory commission, the estimated procurement expenses for the period of ten years will be 350-450 million euros.

Back to list

The Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications published a study on the benefits of public e-services. Nortal has been involved in developing many of the services highlighted in the study.

According to Margus Püüa, the head of state information systems at the Ministry, the 5000 respondents of the study asserted the evident facts that e-services have a clearly positive impact, saving time and improving citizen access. „Having those services is obviously not an aim in itself, so they must provide clear financial or time benefits – to the state or the citizen or, better still, to both,” Püüa noted.

For 12 of the 15 services surveyed, more than 80% of respondents said the online service provided better access and usability. For example, the e-School solution was rated by 80% of respondents as having improved communication between schools and parents.

According to the survey, 72% of all respondents had filed tax returns electronically, making this the most widely used service.

As for time savings, the electronic commercial register was found to reduce the time for creating a new company by 92% compared to the „offline“ service. Tax And Customs Board’s electronic tax returns were also rated as highly time-efficient.

As for Digital Prescription, most family physicians and pharmacists said it had facilitated their work and reduced mistakes. They noted, however, that results could be further improved by speeding up the Internet in rural areas and improving the IT skills of doctors and pharmacists.

Lower ratings were given to e-services involving paperwork, like electronically filled and digitally signed forms which cannot be directly processed, so that an official must manually insert their contents into a computer.

Source: Eesti Päevaleht

Back to list

At the end of 2012, the Chairman of the Fund’s Board, Meelis Paavel, presented Nortal with a letter of gratitude for successful cooperation. The Senior Development Unit Specialist of the State Information Systems Department, Urmas Visse, stated that Nortal’s people have become almost like the Fund’s own IT team:

"Nortal, which is currently developing the EMPIS Information System for the Unemployment Insurance Fund, has by now become almost a part of our team. Thanks to them, in 2009 we were able to implement a critical part of the new information system within six months. Without that, we wouldn’t have been able to provide services for our soaring number of clients during the economic recession. Thanks to Nortal, our administrative burden, as well as that of our clients, has decreased dramatically. Nortal has been flexible, helping us to transform our initial vision into a workable outcome, and together we have been able to find better and more efficient solutions."

We at Nortal would also like to thank the Fund for their trust and cooperation. As our project manager, Alar Huul, has pointed out, we feel privileged to have been chosen as developers for such a dynamic and rapidly developing public sector organisation. It is the on-going joint mission of Nortal and the Unemployment Insurance Fund to help people find their way back to work. As of now, the systems developed for the Fund – namely the labour market services data processing system EMPIS and the document management IS Alfresco – are capable of supporting the Fund’s most typical daily activities. According to the Unemployment Insurance Fund, the joint cooperation has helped find solutions to several important problems:

• In comparison with the old system, registration of the unemployed is now many times quicker (40 min before vs. less than 10 min with EMPIS). For us, it means a reduced workload compared with the economic recession period!
• Unlike the previous information system, we now have standardised and high-quality procedures in place for offering labour market services all over Estonia.
• Job matching – EMPIS automatically matches those looking for a job with their prospective employers. In a month, EMPIS typically sends out 14,000-15,000 e-mails about relevant job offers. This helps us to boost employment!
• Data exchange with other registries – data are received automatically, reducing the paper load for the Fund’s clients; and due to the high-quality data, the Fund can detect possible fraud more easily. Altogether, EMPIS is integrated with 12 separate systems.
• Printable documents, such as decisions and contracts, are automatically generated by EMPIS based on input parameters. As a result, all printed texts are precise, easily manageable and presented on a common template. There are around 50 different types of decisions and approximately 300 different forms of text, as well as around 200 templates for contracts and agreements. The system allows the Fund to save a considerable amount of time and generate better-quality decisions and contracts for its clients.
• The procurement module allows us to order various labour market services from the Fund’s partners (e.g. for retraining purposes) and to plan its budget.
• With the EMPIS calendar, our time, clients and service groups can be managed and monitored from one central system.
• And the list goes on!

Nortal has already spent more than 60,000 man-hours on developing EMPIS and 6000 man-hours on Alfresco, but a lot still needs to be done.

Back to list

Nortal – Information System Services Based on Solid Professional skills

Back to list