From information to action – how the contact point has utilised information collected through customer understanding work

Seeking treatment abroad refers to travelling abroad for the express purpose of receiving medical treatment. Instances such as sudden illnesses or accidents during a holiday trip do not constitute seeking treatment. Customers can seek treatment abroad either independently without a prior authorisation or apply for a prior authorisation from Kela.

Our website now contains a specific customer path for seeking treatment abroad

Customers wanted our website to provide clear and reliable information about seeking treatment abroad. For this reason, we set ourselves the goal of clarifying the content about seeking treatment and how the website guides its visitors. In concrete terms, we have contributed to this by creating a checklist-like path for seeking treatment abroad. We also added frequently asked questions to the website to help customers find more information. In autumn 2024, we carried out user tests with which we tested the functionality of the path.

The clarification of the content of the site is continuous work and progresses one section at a time. The recent development has also focused on clarifying navigation and the front page. For the front page, our goal is to highlight more clearly the role of the contact point as the owner of the site.

Visibility of customer service on the site was improved

As part of the development of the customer service of the website and the contact point, we improved the visibility of customer service on the site. Now, the website has a “Are you still uncertain about something?” element. When you click on it, you can access the contact form for the contact point’s customer service. We also added a form with which the person visiting our website can join the customer panel of the contact point and indicate interesting sections of the website content. In this way, we can also target communications more accurately to our customer panel members.

Relaying information to partners

Customer understanding work revealed that our partners also need information about seeking treatment. In October 2024, the contact point organised a stakeholder seminar in cooperation with the European Commission. The key message from the partners was that there is, especially in healthcare, a need for targeted information about cross-border healthcare, including seeking treatment abroad. In response to this, we are preparing a training concept for the needs of our partners. The aim is to launch the first training sessions during 2025. In addition, we are preparing a broader stakeholder strategy, in which we will review the next steps for our partner work.

Development based on customer understanding is continuous

A topic of discussion in the customer understanding work was how we monitor the development of services and how we can make information collection continuous. One of our goals is to make user surveys on the website repeatable so that we can compare the results of surveys conducted at different times. In addition, we are considering a user survey regarding our customer service.

The contact point’s next target group for customer understanding work is people coming to Finland from abroad. With this customer group, we will start information collection in autumn 2025.

Read the previous parts of the article series:

• How does the Contact Point for Cross-Border Healthcare develop services for people seeking treatment abroad?
• What kind of service needs do people seeking treatment abroad have?
• Customer interviews provide understanding of the service needs of people seeking treatment abroad
• Partners want clear customer communication on reimbursement criteria for treatment abroad