The Finnish Terveysportti Health Portal - Nationwide access to quality medical information

The Terveysportti health portal, started in 2000, is an online service operated by Duodecim Medical Publications Ltd (owned by the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim). At a single Internet address (www.terveysportti.fi), the portal provides key medical contents to support the work of healthcare professionals.

The portal is a comprehensive clinical information source which offers the Physician’s, Nurse’s and Dentist’s Databases, several drug  information databases, patient information database, and the ICD-10 and procedure search engines.

The Finnish national Current Care guidelines together with their patient versions can be searched via this health portal. Also the Cochrane Library, several medical e-textbooks, dictionaries and the major professional journals from Finland and abroad are available in Terveysportti. PubMed can be searched by using Finnish Medical Subject Headings (FinMeSH).

During the year between November 2010 and November 2011 almost 40 million documents were opened from Terveysportti The most popular information source were the drug databases (14 million opened documents), followed by Physician’s database (12 million opened documents), consisting of EBM Guidelines (a point-of-care guideline collection also translated into several other languages) and related databases, and ICD-10 database (5 million opened documents). The use is still growing more than 10% yearly.  The health portal is accessible in all the hospital districts and primary care health care centres and in 700 of the 800 pharmacies in Finland. The portal is used in all the medical libraries in Finland and the librarians teach the medicine students the search skills needed.

Terveysportti is also a kind of patient safety tool in Finland by providing a vast range of quality information sources that are comprehensively available.