Living in the Creative Zone: Nordic Health Innovation

Living in the Creative Zone: Nordic Health Innovation

Living in the Creative Zone, Transforming the World One Idea at a Time is a collection of interviews with international figures driving change forward through purpose and passion projects. For the next year these interviews will publish on the impactmania platform, the complete e-book is available in 2018.

While speaking at Lars Ling’s Nordic Future Days in Sundsvall, Sweden, Jody Turner met Jonas Berggren, founder of Nordic Health Innovation AB, who is working intensely on the cyber healthcare of tomorrow. Jody also interviewed Jonas Berggren’s son Ludvig who has created his own startup to help with the immigration situation in Sweden.


BY JODY TURNER

Jonas, can you share with us how you selected this particular project to develop and why?

We are at an interesting crossroads — How can we use tomorrow’s technology? Could AI or cloud computing help build a democratic society? Could technology make things equal for the population? We ask these types of questions regularly in Sweden.

We considered modern technology and how difficult medical care is for isolated populations. If we could solve this for our local populations, then we could scale those processes to the rest of the world.

Norrland [Northern Sweden, half of all of Sweden] is the home of Sweden’s longest roads and highest average age. Some call it depopulated and uninhabitable. We call it, “The perfect setting for creating the healthcare of tomorrow.”

Digital Health at a Distance

Nordic Health Innovation uses the latest technology to help doctors screen residents who live in remote areas. They can visit a local center nearby that can be housed at a university or even a public library.

We believe you should be able to live wherever you want, but still be a digital stone through away from a clinic or hospital. Here, in Sweden, we are building the test run offering healthcare services and screening to the vulnerable, children, and elderly. These learnings can be applied elsewhere to great effect.We are also testing our solutions in Indonesia and Zanzibar where the children and mothers have high mortality rate.

Where are you at in the process and the development of your project?

We are in the launch stage with a proof of concept phase in the summer within nine communities, working with healthcare professionals and universities. Then in the fourth quarter, we will be looking for partners as we make the global reach happen.

Who are your partners?

My brother and I started Nordic Innovation Health together. I have a long history in Sweden with efficiency, security logistics, and collaboration. My brother has 20 years experience in telemedicine and is a world leader through the Center For Rural Medicine.

We connected with our partners who share grounds with us; cooperation is important to us in Sweden. Ericsson and Microsoft developed what we use in our backend infrastructure. Smaller companies such as Calego and Sigma delivered top knowledge AI and sensors for us to use.

For the concept in distance medicine, we have been testing for three years. We have worked on the software for about a year. Now we enter the testing phase. We have great faith in our design and how it has been implemented. We did our work!

The Swedish government pays for healthcare here. Elsewhere in the world, payment models will vary. We are discussing a completely new business model to engage local entrepreneurs to resell the service. Everything is locked into the digital service we offer, it is transparent.

So not only will we provide medical service, we will help develop entrepreneurial practices for villagers to support this, and scale up the services. We, of course, will make this affordable as our goal is to help.

What was a surprising learning from this for you?

I am passionate about helping the world to come to a better place… building a company that influences the world toward a better future that I want my children to grow up in.

The surprise to me is the speed of transformation in digitalization that I see and believe will happen in the developing world with this project.

This is an app with a lot of technology around it. Various medical devices can be connected to it…with cloud storage. And of course Africa will be mobile phone based, this is the technology of choice in developing worlds.

Thank you Jonas for your work! We look forward to following you into the future of your project and your accomplishments!

Jonas Berggren is a civil engineer and former business manager at Dalkia Facility Management, director of purchasing at SCA Graphic, and business area manager and CEO of SSG Standard Solutions Group for 11 years. SSG is a collaborative enterprise for the whole of Swedish industry and is owned by the six largest forest industry conglomerates in Sweden.