Contents of the EU-healthcare.fi website to be gradually renewed

The website of the Contact Point for Cross-Border Health Care offers information on health services and the right to health care for people moving abroad, people coming to Finland from abroad, people going abroad for treatment and for tourists.

The EU-healthcare.fi website has been up and running since 2015, although initially under a different name, and over the years it has accumulated a lot of information on many different aspects of health care. The Contact Point has been updating the contents in small sections over the years.

The need for a more extensive renewal of the contents of the EU-healthcare.fi website is based both on user feedback and on the observations of the Contact Point’s experts, says Silja Aunola, Online Communications Specialist at the Contact Point.

According to Aunola, the use of the website in general has changed over the years and the current structure of the website and the large number of content pages do not serve users who are used to browsing information and navigating the online world with a mobile device.

“We realised that the contents no longer met today’s needs as the ways of using the website have changed,” says Aunola.

“For example, our customer service sometimes receives questions for which the answer could be found on our website if you knew where to look. However, the structure of the website is not the easiest and finding the information you are looking for is sometimes difficult. The website was originally built from the perspective of computer users but, over the years, the number of people using mobile devices has grown enormously. We are trying to respond to this change by developing the site.”

Information and feedback collected to support the renewal

The Contact Point for Cross-Border Health Care began its customer understanding work in 2023, with the aim of collecting information about the different customer groups of the Contact Point. The information collected through the customer understanding work is used to develop the EU-healthcare.fi website and to update its contents.

At first, the Contact Point will introduce new ways of presenting content on the site, which will be gradually adopted in the different content entities as sections are reviewed, condensed or rewritten.

“There are several pieces to this content reform. The site has already seen some technical updates that will make the content more visual and hopefully easier to understand,” says Aunola.

The content renewal process takes time. The EU-healthcare.fi website contains a lot of information, which is divided into its own subpages. The aim of the Contact Point is to make the contents more concise and to combine subpages so that the information is easier to browse and quicker to find. In addition, the intention is to provide examples to help explain things.

The Contact Point will focus particularly on frequently asked questions (FAQs) at the start of the compilation work. Using a question format will make it easy to explain the main points of even difficult issues, and website users can be directed to the content pages for additional information via links.

“The questions for the FAQs will be collected from the customer service. In addition, for example, when new amendments are introduced to the law, questions will be anticipated and short summaries will be prepared for the FAQ page,” tells Aunola.

Customer service to support website users

Some issues related to cross-border health care are complicated and not always easy to understand. Although the aim is to make the contents more concise and clear, not everything can be simplified because of the complexity of the issues.

“This is why we have a customer service to support website users. The customer service can be contacted by email if something is still unclear.”

The contact form can also be used to submit a question.

Read also: Making the EU-healthcare.fi website more user-oriented