Moona Kautonen works as a senior manager and service designer in our design team. She first heard about Nordic Healthcare Group over five years ago at a breakfast event. The event was aimed at women interested in social and healthcare development, and Moona ended up talking to an NHG project manager.
”The work sounded so interesting that I met her again for breakfast and she encouraged me to apply for a job at NHG,” recalls Moona, who has now been working at NHG for more than five years.
At NHG, Moona works with clients that are mainly hospital districts and pharmaceutical companies. Her projects aim to improve the customer or employee experience, which is why they usually start with a status quo survey, focusing on identifying existing good and poor practices. The aim is to help customers find solutions that will help them deliver social and health services with a higher quality and create a better customer experience. Moona has also had the opportunity to work a lot on digital products, as the development of digital services is an important part of the future of healthcare. NHG’s service designers work on projects such as illustrating the benefits of digitalization in the hospital world to customers by describing the transformation of operations. As NHG has expanded from Finland to the other Nordic countries, the projects increasingly have a wider focus than Finland.
”In our team, you can also get involved in international projects, for example, to find out what the patient and employee experiences of treating a particular health issue are like in the Nordic countries,” Moona explains.
Of all the projects she has been a part of, Moona has most enjoyed the one where she got to be a part of the entire process – from survey to piloting. The aim was to find concrete ways to introduce restaurant-style catering into hospital food services to improve the patient experience. The project as a whole took a couple of years to complete and resulted in a new concrete way of working that was adopted by the hospital district.
Moona describes NHG as a professional and youthful working community, with a great sense of humor. According to Moona, the desire to work in the social and health care sector is what unites the employees. She points out that one of NHG’s strengths is the broad range of know-how that enables looking at the social and healthcare sector and its challenges from many different perspectives. NHG has experts in strategic and management consulting, as well as in data and service design. The educational backgrounds of NHG’s employees also vary, with graduates ranging from engineers, economists, doctors, and Master of Arts, to social scientists like Moona.
”For me, service design skills have been acquired through work. In particular, the development of human-centered social and healthcare services has been a driving force in my career,” says Moona, who has worked in both municipal and private companies in the past.
Moona is inspired by meaningful projects as well as by her team and clients – especially projects that aim to tackle completely new problems. She enjoys teamwork, as it’s exciting to solve challenges and create solutions together. Moona also likes to spend time with her team outside of work, for example on team days. She also gets motivated by her customers and their desire and enthusiasm to change the industry in a way that takes the patient or end-customer into account in the best possible way.
”It is very rewarding to see clients gain new perspectives on what they do through our projects,” says Moona. ”It’s the best kind of feedback to hear that the clients consider our work as important and valuable”.