Improving patient experience in a children's hospital

Abstract

Digital services are increasingly being developed for the healthcare sector. In Finland, the five university hospitals in 2016 launched a virtual hospital platform, Healthvillage.fi that includes several portals. The aim of this study is to explore the needs of children and their families related to digital services in the context of a children's hospital in Finland. Two methods were used to examine the needs and expectations of children and their families: a web-based survey for parents and video diaries for children. We identified nine categories of needs and noticed they were related to better communication between families, healthcare professionals, and peers. These observations were used to further analyze possible novel digital services for child patients' families to support and to complement the recently launched Healthvillage.fi platform.