In the picture Jaana Santaholma and Elina Wiik

Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company, is the new partner in the CleverHealth Network ecosystem led by the Helsinki University Hospital (HUS). In the collaboration, Novartis is looking forward to identifying and co-creating innovations with the ecosystem, to improve patient care and quality of life. Novartis believes that data science and information-based decision making is leading to more impactful health care. At the same time, Novartis hopes that patients in Finland will have a better access to innovative treatments when needed.  

Jaana Santaholma and Elina Wiik, Medical Directors at Novartis, are in charge of scientific collaboration projects in their respective areas. Santaholma is responsible for the projects in the Pharma unit, whereas Wiik works with the oncology projects. Novartis is reimagining medicine by developing new innovative treatments that improve and extend people’s lives. Partnerships represent another important focus area: the company strives to create a healthier society in collaboration with their partners. Similarly, data utilization, digitalisation and knowledge-based management are important resources at Novartis and one of the reasons to join the CHN ecosystem to co-develop digital health innovations.    

Joining with open mind to find solutions together for issues identified in health care 

Santaholma and Wiik are both excited to start collaboration with HUS, the other companies and public sector partners inthe CHN ecosystem. Joining the ecosystem came quite naturally to Novartis, as the goals of the CHN ecosystem matched with those of Novartis. Novartis also welcomes the opportunity to identify and solve health care challenges together with HUS, a forerunner in the health care sector both in Finland and abroad.    

Jaana Santaholma says: ”We share with HUS a common perspective on the usage of data, digitalisation and the fact that these elements will fundamentally change health care and patient care. We want to be part of these activities and help raise the visibility of Finnish health technology expertise, and consequently, get more investments to Finland.” First, Novartis would like to understand better from the ecosystem members what are the most urgent health care challenges requiring new solutions. The company also wishes to learn how Novartis’ knowledge and expertise in developing personalized treatments, with existing international network, could add value for the ecosystem.  

As an example, Novartis locally conducts Real World Evidence studies utilizing data from the health care registries and hospital data lakes to better understand for example heart failure, migraine, solid and haematological malignancies and their current management.  

In search of scalable solutions  

Novartis aims to identify development areas where ideally the solutions could be scalable to different therapy areas. Together with the ecosystem, Novartis would like to identify challenges appearing along the patient’s journey to co-develop solutions to improve patient experience and care. The solutions could be e.g. related to personalized medicine or more impactful allocation of value-based healthcare. They will, for their part, help to improve patients’ access to new and innovative therapies and solutions in Finland. At the end of the day, this will provide benefit for the whole society and bring much needed added value to the healthcare sector. 

Elina Wiik characterized the ecosystem collaboration in a following way: “We are part of the healthcare, and we would like to contribute by co-creating solutions to the identified health care challenges. Partners are aiming for the same goals; better health in society and knowledge-based management leading to a more impactful use of health care resources. All stakeholders within the health care sector are needed to achieve these goals to develop solutions for better future health care. 

Visions of Novartis on the CHN collaboration  

To sum up, Jaana Santaholma shares her vision on the results of the upcoming collaboration: “I hope that in 3-5 years’ time, we have managed to co-create a concrete solution which will help Finnish patients to gain access to innovative treatments for patients in need. We want to develop solutions which will prolong patients’ lives with good quality of life and help to allocate the health care resources as impactfully as possible.”