SDI’s Tech for Healthcare Mission
The health and care sectors in the Nordics are digitalizing at high speed in order to meet the challenges of an aging population and implementing new technologies in health and care. The Nordic countries are globally in front of digitalizing their societies and are actively looking for new technologies to benefit their citizens. The governments of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have on national levels published ambitious digital healthcare plans to transform their public health care systems, which also outlines their needs for the coming years.
The health and social care systems in the Nordics have many similarities with the NHS system in the UK, such as funding structures and decentralisation. In the Nordic countries the healthcare systems are to a high degree publicly funded with between 75-85% funded through taxes, these systems are at a large extent decentralised with regional and local structures (municipalities) responsible for different aspects of citizen care. Spending on health care the EU average except for Finland which is slightly below, but healthcare spend per capita is significantly higher in all the Nordic countries compared to the UK. Much of the infrastructure to enable digital solutions with health and social care is already in place such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) which has 100% coverage as well as e-prescriptions. Digital maturity in the population is high and personal identification numbers have been in place for decades. With the infrastructure in place, the government’s focus on digitalisation and the relatively high spending creates great test beds and opportunities for Scottish companies selling into health and care systems.
Sofia Noras, Trade Specialist Life Sciences, Scottish Development International based in our Copenhagen office recently hosted a webinar outlining the opportunities in the Nordics, you can click here to watch the recording.
In March 2020 Scottish companies will have the opportunity to participate in a week long digital health trade mission to the Nordics with Scottish Development International, which will include visits to Copenhagen (Monday to Wednesday) and Helsinki (Wednesday to Friday). The trip will include presentations, visits and meetings with the main corporate and public players within in the health and care systems here. Where possible, SDI will also schedule time for you to have your own one to one meetings. Prior to the mission itself, there will be a pre-mission event on how companies can position and prepare themselves appropriately for the Nordic healthcare markets. There will be no charge for a company to attend the mission, and depending on prior support they will review potential financial support towards travel and accommodation costs on an individual company basis.
Please let my colleague David J Smith know if you wish to discuss this further, and if of interest, the team would be grateful if you could respond with the completed application form by close of play on Friday 10th January 2020.