Make Finland the first country to redesign healthcare for the AI era

Finland has spent years debating how to reorganise and finance healthcare. But the underlying structural problem keeps getting harder.

Our population is ageing, the number of people needing healthcare is growing relative to the working population, and healthcare costs face significant long-term upward pressure. The Ministry of Finance estimates Finland's long-term sustainability gap at approximately €7.5 billion, with population ageing as its largest underlying cause. At the same time, the state is already allocating more than €27 billion annually to wellbeing services counties.

We cannot solve this only by reorganising the existing system or asking healthcare professionals to work harder.

We should ask a bigger question:

What would we build if we designed Finland's healthcare system today, with the technology that now exists?

AI capabilities in medicine have advanced extraordinarily quickly. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 50 studies found large language models already performing at approximately the same level as healthcare professionals in triage overall. More importantly, clinicians supported by these systems achieved higher diagnostic accuracy than clinicians working alone. Other recent research has shown leading AI systems outperforming physicians on specific diagnostic and clinical reasoning tasks.

This does not mean replacing doctors with AI. It means using technology to make every minute of scarce healthcare professional capacity dramatically more valuable.

Today, a huge amount of healthcare capacity is consumed before and around the actual clinical decision: understanding why the patient is seeking help, collecting their history and symptoms, determining what information is missing, finding the appropriate pathway, coordinating referrals, identifying where the patient can actually be treated, and arranging the next step.

Much of this can increasingly be done with technology, while keeping clinical decisions with licensed healthcare professionals.

Finland should become the first country to build an open, safe infrastructure layer around its healthcare system that allows qualified technology companies to help patients navigate it.

Instead of requiring every new company to negotiate integrations separately with every wellbeing services county and healthcare provider, Finland should define national interfaces and standards for things such as patient-authorised health information, referrals, appointment availability and booking, identity and authentication, and other core healthcare infrastructure.

For example, if a licensed physician has already determined that a patient needs physiotherapy, imaging or a specialist consultation, an authorised system meeting defined patient-safety, security and audit requirements should be able, with the patient's permission, to find the appropriate provider and book that next step directly into the existing healthcare system.

The same principle should extend further as the technology matures: enable companies that pass sufficiently demanding clinical safety, information security and audit requirements to build new AI-enabled access and navigation layers on top of Finnish healthcare infrastructure.

The government does not need to predict which technology or company will ultimately work best. It needs to make the healthcare system safely programmable and let Finnish companies compete to improve the outcome.

This could simultaneously address three of Finland's biggest challenges:

1. Healthcare productivity: more of scarce professional time can be focused on the work where professional judgement is actually required.

2. Patient outcomes: patients can reach the appropriate next step faster, with better structured information available when a healthcare professional makes a decision.

3. Economic growth: Finland could become the world's best environment for building, validating and exporting healthcare technology.

Patient safety should be the condition for opening the system, not the argument for keeping it closed. Companies accessing these interfaces should meet strict requirements for clinical governance, information security, auditability, data protection and regulatory compliance. Access can be progressively expanded as evidence accumulates.

Finland already has many of the ingredients that other countries are trying to build: high trust, excellent clinicians, national health data infrastructure, a highly digital population and a relatively small healthcare system in which national standards are actually possible.

The opportunity is to turn those advantages into something much bigger.

Set a national objective that by 2030 Finland is the best country in the world to build, validate and deploy safe AI-enabled healthcare technology, and use it to solve our own healthcare productivity crisis first.

If we succeed, Finland would not only make its healthcare system more sustainable. We could create technology and infrastructure that the rest of the ageing world will eventually need as well, potentially enabling to create the largest company Finland has ever produced at the same time.