The FINe-Health Foundry is a major joint research initiative funded by Business Finland. It aims to develop a nationwide foundation health model capable of supporting clinical diagnostics, individual prevention, and population-level policy simulations.
Led by the ELLIS Institute Finland in collaboration with Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Turku, the project brings together top talent in machine learning, clinical NLP, and health informatics. The project has been awarded nearly five million euros for an initial three-year period under Business Finland's Rise to Challenge (Näytönpaikka) program.
Core Objectives
Clinical Support
Providing context-aware decision support to clinicians during patient care, integrating electronic health records with guidelines.
Patient-Targeted Prevention
Predicting individual disease risks for over 200 conditions for every resident, allowing early personalized interventions and prevention.
Causal Reasoning in AI
Moving beyond basic pattern correlations to capture cause-and-effect clinical paths, helping doctors choose the most effective treatments.
Our Group's Research Activities
Our group contributes directly to the core research agenda of the FINe-Health Foundry. We focus on three critical pillars:
1. Pretraining Foundation Health Model: We study and build training pipelines for foundation models trained on nationwide health databases and structured longitudinal electronic health records, ensuring high representation across specialized clinical cohorts.
2. Medical Reasoning and Grounding: We develop advanced post-training techniques to ensure foundation health models reason accurately over medical knowledge graphs, clinical instructions, and verify factuality and medical safety boundaries.
3. Agentic Methods for Virtual Labs: We construct interactive "virtual laboratories" where expert medical professionals can interact with, audit, and provide expert feedback to LLM-powered medical agents to align their reasoning with clinical guidelines.
Nationwide Ecosystem
By leveraging Finland's unique, comprehensive, and centralized national health registers (such as Kanta and registry databases), the FINe-Health Foundry trains a secure and versatile foundation health model at a population scale, while respecting strict data privacy and ethics boundaries.