My parents were originating from the Carelia-region (home of Kalevala) called Rääkkylä of Finland. I was born 25th Jan 1955 in Suonenjoki, near the city of Kuopio, where I finished my highschool and graduated from the Kuopio University Medical Faculty in 1980. After the M.D. examination, I worked a couple of years as a GP at the Health Centre of City of Varkaus, where a comprehensive information system for primary care called FINSTAR ® (based on COSTAR ®) was developed.

Because Medical Informatics seemed to be "the future", I worked from -84 till -90 at the Computing Center of Kuopio University with FINSTAR-development (that was implemented in about 50 sites by Logica Ltd ) and Hospital Information Systems (biggest hospitals Helsinki UH , Kuopio UH, Turku UH) based on the co-operation with VA Hospitals. Both systems based on M-Technology have a strong development infrastructure , originating from Massachutes General Hospital. My work included also ECG-expert systems and General Practitioners prescribing habits.

From -91 I have worked at Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT) in the Wellness and Healthcare domain, specializing more on medical language (UMLS, MLM, ICD, ontologies, SNOMED etc.) and participated in early 90'ies in CEN/TC251/WG2-work as a selected expert developing ENV 12264:1996 (Structure of Concept Systems - Vocabulary) and ENV 12610:1996 (Medicinal Product Identification). During 93/94 I had a one year visiting professorship of at CNR (Istituto Tecnologie Biomediche), Rome), where I was working e.g. in the GALEN-project. In the late 90'ies, I was also working in a project called EHTO (European Health Telematics Observatory). My formal C.V. (in rtf) is also visible. So electronic patient records based on medical terminology have been my special interest for the past 20 years and nowadays also personal health records. Lately my biggest interest has been in HL7- Finland . During 1997-2000 I was chairing the recently formed ERCIM WG-BMI. In 1999, I also found myself working in Sarajevo. Starting 2000, I have worked in a EU-project (IST) called PICNIC (Professionals and Citizens Network for Integrated Care) with modeling tools like Rational Rose. There is also growing interest on Open software development. During 2003, I have worked also in Lesotho as a consultant. From 2004 to 2009 responsible for national Electronic Patient Record - Clinical Document Arhitecture subprojects funded by Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. Recently I have been working also with Personal Health Record projects , more intensively with Continua Health Alliance and Care4Me

I like to see my three daughters growing (now I am grandfather), listening or playing all kinds of music (favourites e.g. Leonard Cohen, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Harry Chapin and, ofcourse, this ), sometimes went diving (usually in Kristiansund with the beatiful island of Grip , Norway). According to a filosophic test (only in finnish), my "nearest" philosopher was Arthur Schopenhauer. Since 1996 I started again to play tennis and my homeclub is Tampere Tennis Club. August 2001 I finally started playing golf and joined Pirkanmaa Golf Club.

My contact information You will find at the VTT phonebook. You can contact me by email. Have a nice day and bye ! (Last update 1st Feb 2011)