Helsinki Children’s Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility that serves sick children from all over Finland, opened earlier this year with a price tag of €170 million, replacing an outdated facility from 1948.

The building is a case study in patient-centered design and also includes a number of process innovations and digital technologies (including an iPad in each patient room).

“Before and during the planning period … what we were aiming to produce was high quality and safe medical care, excellent patient experience, and excellent process efficiency,” Lahdenne said. “We are not trying to produce high-quality medical care at any cost. We cannot really be proud of our high-quality results if they are not cost-effective or if they are not producing very good patient experiences. So this triangle was really taken into consideration strongly at every step of the planning process.”

The hospital has a daunting charge. As the flagship pediatric hospital in Finland’s mostly-public healthcare system, they are responsible for the routine care of children in the Helsinki metro area, which encompasses about a third of Finland’s population of 5 million. They are also responsible for many areas of specialty care for children throughout the country.

“We are quite a big children’s hospital because we cover not only this tertiary care, but we also act as a secondary care children’s hospital for the whole Helsinki area and surrounding municipalities,” Lahdenne said. “And that’s why we have almost 150,000 outpatient patients a year, almost 60,000 emergency care and so on.”