The objective of the Co-created Health and Wellbeing – CoHeWe project is to promote cooperation between businesses and cities and enable the development and implementation of new, customer-oriented wellbeing and health services. The project focuses particularly on solutions for preventing diseases and promoting wellbeing.
The project aims at improving co-creation methods through the utilisation of cities’ existing development platforms and operating models, with the needs of municipal residents and health care professionals serving as the basis for developing new services by means of co-creation and low-threshold pilots.
The cities participating in the CoHeWe project – Helsinki, Tampere, Oulu and Vantaa – will co-create approximately 35 new services or service concepts in collaboration with companies, health care professionals and residents. In addition to this, the project will also increase collaboration between the cities and promote a culture of experimentation in the health care and well-being sector. The project will be implemented in 2019–2020 and has a budget of EUR 1,894,253. The project is funded by the Uusimaa Regional Council.
Collaboration between cities and companies
CoHeWe facilitates the implementation of new innovative products and services related to wellbeing and health. At the same time, the project aims at providing residents with higher quality and smarter services for maintaining and improving personal health and wellbeing The project partners are Tampere University Hospital Tays, the City of Tampere, Forum Virium Helsinki, the City of Vantaa, the City of Oulu, the University of Oulu and Laurea University of Applied Sciences.
In Helsinki, the practical implementation of the project is coordinated by Forum Virium Helsinki, and the pilots will be conducted in collaboration with the City of Helsinki’s Social Services and Health Care Division. Through the project, Forum Virium aims to build new collaboration with relevant companies, including start-ups that provide artificial intelligence solutions, and City departments.
To support the pilots selected for the project, Forum Virium will help bring in 1–2 larger companies to provide support by, for example, offering technologies for speeding up the implementation of AI pilots to the companies conducting the pilots. In addition to this, Forum Virium will also hold a series of workshops aimed at companies and organise a results seminar at the end of the project.
The project’s objectives
The CoHeWe project offers companies an opportunity to utilise cities as development platforms in the validation of products and services. This will allow companies to gain first-hand knowledge of development needs while providing municipal residents with new and better services co-created with professionals.
The service pilots to be carried out in collaboration with companies will be harmonised between the four participating cities, which will help companies scale their services nationwide.
Indirectly, the project will also help cities and social and health care sector actors to prepare for future service development, investments and acquisitions. The aim is to also expand city service providers’ understanding of the potential of select technologies, particularly those related to artificial intelligence.