Public defence in Industrial Engineering and Management, M.Sc. (Tech) Olli Halminen

Title of the doctoral thesis: Analysing the Performance of Meso-level Care Systems Including Long and Short Term Services

Opponent: Associate Professor / Leader Lill Sverresdatter Larsen, Norwegian Nurses Association NSF, Norway
Custos: Professor Paul Lillrank, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management

The public defence will be organised on campus and in Zoom, https://aalto.zoom.us/j/68772665666.

The thesis is publicly displayed 10 days before the defence in the publication archive Aaltodoc of Aalto University.

Electronic thesis

Public defence announcement

The upcoming wellbeing areas in Finland could benefit from regional-level managerial analytics, states the forthcoming doctoral thesis of M.Sc (tech.) Olli Halminen. In the thesis, a system model depicting the use of long and short services was created. The thesis aimed to find managerial logics of care management that would improve system-level cost-effectiveness. “Social and healthcare service systems that include both long and short term services are challenging to manage. Cross-organizational care pathways cannot be managed by one unit, but their coordination needs a holistic, system-level point of view instead”, Halminen states.
The research data included information on social and health care service use of 300,000 individuals aged over 74 years, in 65 Finnish municipalities. The sub-studies included in the thesis analysed e.g. the service cost of last life year, effects of rightly timed Alzheimer’s disease medication on admission rate to 24-hour care, and the effects of a legislative reform on the long-term care structures in municipalities. The findings of sub-studies were synthesised into four managerial logics of long and short term services. Firstly, a too low level of long-term services will increase short-term service use, whereas a too high long-term service level can easily increase costs. Secondly, uncoordinated short-term service use can lead to fragmentation of care pathways and crowding of secondary care and emergency care departments. Thirdly, right balance of long and short term services can bring “slowing-down” efficiency to healthcare and prevent deterioration of long-term health status and subsequent transitions to 24-hour care facilities. Finally, transitions into and out from a care system should be considered, or the primary prevention of health problems and faster solving of health problems. “Currently there is notable variance in the service structures of municipalities. The wellbeing areas should create analytics-based practices so that patients with similar health status and life situation would receive similar level of care services in different parts of the wellbeing area.”
The thesis also considers whether these new managerial logics could be transferable to other care systems with long and short term services, such as mental health services and child welfare services.

Contact details of the doctoral student: [email protected], +358400563730