ERA platform designed for social care and healthcare needs is capable of even more
ERA (short for the Finnish words for electronic prescriptions and archive) is a platform designed for social care and healthcare use, which also connects other national systems. What does Atostek ERA include?
As our experts often say, ERA’s features allow it to meet a wide variety of needs. What is exceptional about the platform is that it is equally well suited to healthcare and social care needs.
Social care and healthcare professionals can use ERA either directly through its own user interface or through a separate integration. In certain cases, the user may not even realize they are using ERA, because the service can be used in the background when using other systems.
ERA from different viewpoints
So how can the average person benefit from ERA? And what potential does it have for social care and healthcare professionals?
Briefly put, ERA processes customer and patient data in accordance with national legislation and other requirements. The service is used to process electronic prescriptions and patient record entries into the Kanta digital service for the social care and healthcare sector.
Here’s a practical example: You are on a skiing holiday in Lapland and injure your foot. You are treated by a local doctor. Treatment is continued when you get back home. With ERA, your local doctor back home can go to the Kanta archive and see entries made by other doctors.
For social care and health care professionals, ERA is a tool for easy access to patient or social care data. To use ERA, such professionals must have a valid ID card.
Why was ERA developed?
Originally, some nine years ago, ERA was developed to meet a pure customer need. At the time, a private healthcare organization needed an electronic prescription service, because the law also required the private sector to provide electronic prescriptions.
Our experts aimed to find out how such a service could be built. It was soon obvious that this was such a major project that no individual healthcare organization could afford it.
However, Atostek’s thought was not abandoned, but refined: what if we developed a platform that could serve multiple organizations and would also be cheaper for individual actors than a fully tailored solution? The idea from the beginning was for ERA to be a smart, inexpensive system.
ERA at the moment
Today ERA is an information system platform that enables the agile development social care and healthcare systems and applications that are connected to national information systems and use information within them. ERA ensures that national requirements and legal requirements are met when processing patient and customer data, as well as drawing on data from national systems for use in customer data systems, and enabling easy entry of data into national systems.
At the moment, ERA is used in approximately 800 to 1,000 organizations, both public and private. ERA’s new value added services, such as Covid-19 certificate printing and registration service, have increased the number of customers significantly. ERA is used by municipalities, cities and hospital districts, among others.
Data security has been paid particular attention: ERA guarantees that social care and healthcare data is processed securely in customer systems. Thanks to ERA, information in the Kanta database is easy and safe to use and produce.
Quite a few systems and applications based on ERA have already been built. For example, ERA Kokonaiskuva is a service that collects patient data from Kanta services into an intuitive format. It is easy for the attending physician to get an overview of all diagnoses, procedures and medication.
And the future?
Previously, many considered the Kanta services mainly as an archive just for the storage of huge amounts of data that would never be used. However, during recent years, data in the Kanta Services has been applied and Kanta has turned into a service to and from which data is transferred and actually put to use.
The plan is to make ERA into a system that will support just this kind of development, and to provide by far the best method to access national social care and healthcare services.
Ida Pellinen
Marketing and Communications Specialist
