Welcome to this Terveystalo's first ever Capital Markets Day. My name is Kati Kaksonen. I'm in charge of investor relations and sustainability here at Terveystalo. It is my great pleasure to introduce our speakers today. First of all, Mr. Ville Iho, our CEO, who I've had the pleasure of knowing already over a decade. Ville has a long experience from transportation and aviation industries, and especially transformation projects and development in that area. We have Mrs. Eeva Nyberg-Oksanen, who if you have any special questions related to applied mathematics or queuing theory, she's your person to go to. She has a PhD in that area. Eeva's our director of strategy and PMO. She's also been instrumental in ramping up our testing capability in COVID-19, as that was also her previous role just a day ago. Eeva is a multitasker here at Terveystalo.
We have Mr. Petri Bono, our chief medical officer. Petri joined Terveystalo in 2019, and he has a long experience from medical leadership roles and also from clinical research. Following after that, we have Mr. Niki Kotilainen, who's already a long-term Terveystalo person already before joining the company in 2015. He's been working with Terveystalo case in advisory role when he was working at Boston Consulting Group and advising on strategy when Bridgepoint was selling the company to EQT back in the days. We have my old and new colleague, Noora Härmä, who's joined the company a month ago. I'm really impressed that she was willing to join us here today and speak about revenue management and pricing, which is her area of specialty of over 15 years from both transportation and aviation and management consulting.
Finally, we have Mr. Ilkka Laurila, who most of you already know since the IPO, at least. He's a long-timer here at Terveystalo, joined the company already in 2012, and even before joining the company and in his current capacity, he worked with the Terveystalo case in an advisory role back at the EY. We have really fascinating program for you today, in my humble opinion, of course. We'll be talking about a lot how we see the COVID-19 pandemic transforming the industry for good, and how we are prepared to take on this opportunity going forward. We'll also be talking about the strategic focus areas and how these initiatives that Niki, Noora, and Eeva especially will elaborate in their presentations will contribute to reaching our financial targets going forward. Without further ado, I will give this over to Ville.
Excellent. Thank you, Kati. Good day from my behalf. Kati introduced me shortly already. For those of you who don't know me, who have not met me, Ville Iho is the name, CEO since last December in Terveystalo. Extremely proud and happy to be here today presenting our great agenda with the best brains, I would say, in this industry, at least in Finland. This, as Kati said, this package is extensive. It's fairly heavy. Very good thing about our agenda and our presentations is that we are ready to take as difficult questions as you can come up with. This is not headline strategy. This is already very deep into implementation phase, which we are talking about. Please challenge us and challenge our experts whenever you come up with a question. Kati mentioned already that we are going to talk about COVID-19.
This is not COVID-19 presentation as such. We are talking about Terveystalo history, it's proper, being in this industry, to comment quite extensively the impact that we see from COVID-19 crisis to this industry in sort of early history of the crisis, first phase, present, a little bit of a trading update, how we see the future. What is going to be the permanent change, which is accelerated by this crisis. Good things come to those who won't wait. This is one of the slogans that we have used during this crisis, sort of demonstrating our approach to tackling this crisis, which is agility, speed, flexibility, of course, built on hard medical science. COVID-19 has tested Terveystalo thus far in two very different phases. Early on, of course, in this crisis, Finland was basically closing down.
We had lockdown in place during April. The challenge for us was basically threefold. Scale down with the very hard demand supply management services where the demand declined, shift very promptly to digital channels, scale down the cost. This first phase of COVID crisis, I would say that test, Terveystalo passed with flying colors. We reported in our Q2 reporting first of all, our ability to scale up testing, our ability to ramp up digital services, which is unseen in this industry. Equally importantly, our ability to scale down our cost base in this fast and dynamic situation. You could see that one in our Q2 numbers, that was sort of a surprise to the market how dynamic we were with our cost base, not to ourselves, but to the rest of the world. That was the first phase.
Second phase is the one that we are living right now. That's sort of post mid-summer season. Finland, as we all know, is again mobile. People are moving about. People are not anymore afraid of coming to appointments or taking care of their healthcare needs. At the same time, we have seen this surge of COVID-19 tests for obvious reasons, because Finland is mobile and there's this risk lurking around in the corners. This service is needed basically in unprecedented numbers. For H2, it was of course very difficult to make an estimate on the forecast how we see the recovery. We played with scenarios. We basically played with the four different scenarios before H2. We selected one as our base scenario. For sure we have a scenario how base underlying business is going to recover.
On that one, we also disclosed some early numbers from H2, so you know how July went from underlying business point of view for private and corporate customers. Of course, there's a great tool available because two different organizations are publishing credit card data, and we have said that it's quite good proxy for our recovery. There you have quite good information where the underlying business is. As to H2 in general and underlying business in our corporate, private, and public businesses, we can say that we are at our plan. We are at our scenario. On top of that one, of course, it has been surprise at least for many that this testing activity has been so vast. There's a lack of resources in testing, and there's a surge in demand for our testing services.
For that one, we have not actively disclosed any specific numbers, but actually you can follow our testing volumes in our open data. We are openly reporting testing volumes. Then again, of course, the testing consumer prices are available. Of course, they are out there in the open. Of course, you can do your own math and estimate what is this additional tailwind doing for the business. Later in the presentation, Mr. Petri Bono, who knows COVID-19 better than anybody, will give some more light on medical side of COVID-19 and how we see that scenario building up. What are the things that could happen when this epidemic evolves over time? Immediate impact on our business is sort of self-evident, and I describe a couple of things, a couple of angles, and few data points, how we can then estimate the business recovery during H2.
At least equally important is the longer-term impact of COVID-19 on our business, on healthcare in general, even globally. In a way, this is self-evident, but it's nice to have some proof points and some sort of data points. What is the take by the consumers and also by the professionals on healthcare in the future and impact of COVID-19? There are many trends that get accelerated by COVID-19. People are more aware of their health. They are interested in finding out data around their own health and different diseases. Overall wellbeing becomes more and more interesting and important for people. People are willing, actually, to invest more also in their own health, as we have seen early on and during this COVID-19 crisis. This is suddenly the most important thing that there's around globally.
This is a sort of catalyst for transformation in this business to start with. There are some other aspects to COVID-19. We can see in this crisis situation, of course, that mental health becomes more important as one medical area, and then different type of gadgets and personal data becomes also interesting. At least I have heard many stories around that, for example, Oura Ring or whatever Polar data was the first sign that now there's something wrong, and at the end of the day, it was COVID-19. The medical science around that one, maybe Petri can comment on that one. It's not hard medical science as such, but it's just a manifestation that people are really interested in data, and data presents an opportunity for this industry going forward. I said that the attitude to healthcare is changing.
Most self-evident area where this change can be seen is digital health. Here we have some data from McKinsey. This is from U.S. market. Self-evident shift have been seen in attitudes, both from consumers and both from medical organizations and professionals. What this states basically is that people on consumer side are willing to use digital health. They are enjoying the experience. They are basically already loving it. On the other hand, professional organizations and professionals are willing to accept this one, so they are willing to test this one, how this actually works. If you compare this industry to some others and to some other transformation stories, we are in a phase after which the development is going to be really speedy. When consumers already love this stuff and there's a wide acceptance among professionals, this is going to be an implementation competition going forward.
Obvious question from Terveystalo point of view is, where do we stand in this transformation? Are we behind? Are we ahead? It's quite nice, actually, to present some quite impressive data points around Terveystalo digital health. Many of you have heard about Teladoc and recent merger between Teladoc and Livongo. It's sort of a rock star of digital health, with a valuation around EUR 17 billion. Looking at the scale, Teladoc's home market, U.S., if you take digital visits per capita in U.S. by Teladoc, and then Terveystalo digital visit per capita in Finland, we are the bigger one by far. Actually, you can state that we are leading this change. Finland is a mature market when it comes to digital services, and we have early on started this development, so we are ready.
Even in absolute numbers, taking into consideration the scale and the market size, this is quite impressive. This year, we are not reaching quite 1 million digital visits, but we will land between 500,000 and 1 million, somewhere in there. The development is really speedy, and we want to push this one. Terveystalo started its digital health organization as a separate entity some four years back. We have been building these pipes already four years. The situation was just a catalyst for this demand, and we were ready. We were fast to react, and you can see this one in the numbers. From our business model point of view, important thing to understand is, compared to some other digital players, Terveystalo is not concentrating on only one slice of the care chain or service chain.
Our take on this one is, as in our normal services, integrated care chains, so matching sort of full customer demand to our services. That's going to be the future of healthcare. People are not interested in buying one slice of the service from here and the other one from there. You need to have a platform which is combining these services in a meaningful way to meaningful products, and then ability to operate that platform so that the delivery is seamless. That is our DNA, and that is our way forward as well. That was a very short commentary on COVID-19's impact on Terveystalo short term history, present, and then a short commentary on the transformation that this crisis presents to this healthcare business. I think it's highly valuable to dive slightly deeper into this area.
As I said, this is not COVID-19 seminar as such, but since we do have the expertise, we feel that we are leading the pack in the response to this crisis. We thought that Petri Bono, our Chief Medical Officer, will give more details on how he sees and how we see a crisis from medical point of view. You get even more details, more insights, and can ask more detailed questions as well. Petri, please.
Thank you, Ville. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Petri Bono, and I'm the Chief Medical Officer at Terveystalo. I've been in this position for one and a half years, and before that, I've been trained at the Helsinki University Hospital, first as a medical oncologist, and thereafter I've been in various leadership positions there, leading the comprehensive cancer center for six, seven years, and thereafter, I was the Chief Medical Officer of the whole Helsinki University Hospital. This is my background, how I come to this COVID-19 pandemic. Based on that experience, so I will comment how we've been doing with the transformation test, and I think I'm really proud to tell you today about the ramp-up and how we have answered the demand of our customers to this pandemic.
In the second part of my talk, I will also reflect a little bit about the world-class quality work we are doing at Terveystalo, and of course, in that I will also focus on the added value that provide for our customers if they are following the way Terveystalo is taking care of them. During the COVID pandemic, we have performed more than 70,000 COVID tests at Terveystalo. At the moment, we do something between two or 2,500 tests per day, meaning that if we do in Finland 10,000 to 13,000 tests a day, large number of all the tests performed in Finland is actually done by Terveystalo. I show here the numbers on the left side of the panel, and you can see, sorry for those who cannot follow in Finnish, we have actually done both tests with the classical golden standard, the PCR test.
We were the first ones in Finland to introduce that test as a private provider. Thereafter, we also introduced the antibody test. The most recent one is the fastest antigen test that we are now out and already testing with our first patients with that. The ramp-up has been really fast. On the second panel, you can see the ramp-up. We saw that in the middle, those smallest panels, they were the quiet summer weeks when the testing was low in Finland, and the situation overall was quite stable. In August, you can see how fast the ramp-up has been, and the different colors reflect different areas of Finland. For example, the dark blue is tests that have been performed here in Helsinki and capital area. We publish everything openly on webpage.
You can see the address there, you can follow also from the webpage areas where we've done different tests, how many positive findings we've had, you can follow that what's been the overall number of positive cases from our tests. In the beginning, it was about 5%, now during the last two months, it's been something like 0.2%-0.3% of all the tests performed. What I'm really proud is the panel on the right. That's the time it takes from the onset of sample taken to the answer to the patient. It's been one and a half days throughout the country, throughout the pandemic. We've been able also in August, we've been able to maintain the speed in reporting the result to the customer. This one and a half days, it's the speed for the whole country.
It's sure that if a sample was taken here in downtown Helsinki, it's a lot faster for the client to get the result. This also includes all the cases from eastern Finland, from northern Finland, the average has remained stable despite the fast ramp-up of the number of tests we have performed. What is the overall situation of COVID-19 at the moment? Globally, we are still having increasing numbers of new cases almost every day, and we are still in the middle of the first wave. Personally, I don't think at all that in Finland we have a second wave ongoing in testing. Why so? Is that the absolute number of positive cases hasn't increased in Finland. It's still just two out of 1,000 tests that are positive in the tests. In some parts of Europe, actually, it may be different.
You can see on the left side that the number of positive cases after coming down at the end of the spring, it has started to rise quite rapidly, for example, in Spain, in France. On a European level, we may talk about a second wave. No one knows what actually will be the future of COVID-19. This is a figure taken from one article published in U.S. about possible scenarios. This is the figure what I personally most believe in. I don't think we are just getting close to a major peak coming later. I think we are experiencing the largest and first wave globally at the moment. There will be further smaller waves coming every now and then for the next two, three years, meaning that we need to learn how to live with this pandemic.
At Terveystalo, we have all the testing modalities available to our customers now. I'm really proud that we've been able to also maintain the quality in the testing, and we've been maintained to implement them rapidly to our armamentarium of different tests. However, the field is moving forward and is changing constantly. On the left side, this is from Saturday, a new almost landmark paper coming from the Bible of medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, where it was shown that actually what we're doing everywhere is now is that we're taking the sample from the nasopharyngeal cavity with the swab. If a test is taking directly from the saliva, actually the end result is not worse.
Meaning that the area where the test will be taken is likely to change in future, and also different newer test modalities that can be directly used by the consumer may also become available. This is on the right side, FDA has announced half-green light to a new kind of test by Abbott that will test directly from the saliva, the presence of COVID-19 virus. We cannot predict that which will be the test that everyone will be using, let's say, after next winter, but it's sure that as we've seen during the last six months, so there will be changes in the way professionals describes these tests and also what the results will mean for the patients or for the customers.
The important thing is that a professional can have all the available tests in the panel, and that this is something that we've been proud all the time. We've been able also to inform throughout the country all our professionals how to use them and guide the usage of them according to the national guidelines. Actually, what we're doing, we're following the national guideline here. We have a hybrid strategy that is to test a lot, trace a lot, then isolate, and finally, try to treat individuals. This shows about the speed of the ramp-up that we've done with our digital appointments to meet the new demand. Last year, we had about, in 2019, 150,000 digital visits, and we've been able to ramp that up on some March weeks to tenfold what it was.
We've been able to maintain that also high level of digital visits during the coming months now. At the moment, on a weekly level, we are something between 15,000-20,000 digital appointments per week, which may then end up something between half million to 1 million visits in 2020, as Ville mentioned. Last year, of all doctor's appointments at Terveystalo, 3.5% were done via digital visits, and this year we will probably land up something around 15%. It's not just chat, it's also video appointments. It's video appointments without reservation so that it's online video appointment.
Finally, we have also launched at the end of last year, also so-called assisted video appointment, which means that the patient can be with a nurse 200 kilometers away from the doctor, and doctor can auscultate lungs, heart, look at the mouth and ear, and make a clinical diagnosis very well with our new tools that we are using at digital appointments. Of course, this has also resulted that our app, Oma Terveys, that you saw already a figure in Ville's presentation, more customers are also getting familiar with that. Actually, the users of that has been doubled during the coronavirus pandemic. Life is not just about corona, although we've been very active to maintain the quality also related to all operations to coronavirus testing.
I'm really proud that we have been able to fully digitalize the path for the customer so that customer can get access to doctor within seconds, make the reservation online by himself or herself, then just go physically to get the test, and then finally, automatically get the test result to the Oma Terveys app. Meaning that we have digitalized everything that can be done in the care path. That's quality for me. In a big picture about our other operations, we go beyond COVID-19. Terveystalo has been showing the way in Nordic countries how to do world-class quality work. On the right side, you can see an article by the father of value-based healthcare, Professor Michael Porter from Harvard Business School, who has actually published a landmark paper five years ago about a strategy that will fix the healthcare.
In a nutshell, it's about value-based healthcare. Improving outcome and reducing cost. At Terveystalo, our quality framework, we report that every year in a quality book that we've done now four years in a row. This year's edition in 2019, that we published in February, included 38 pages of quality data from our operations. When we do our quality work, so actually what we do, we follow the international best standards. We follow the framework developed by Michael Porter and colleagues, then that's actually provided to most healthcare providers via a non-profit organization called ICHOM, which is International Consortium for Health Outcome Measurement. Our quality book includes most of the aspects that ICHOM recognizes being high-quality work, and we are really proud about that. That means that all our professionals, including 5,800 MDs, they follow the quality standards that we want them to follow.
When we talk about quality at Terveystalo, of course we have, as you can see in the quality triangle on the left side, we talk about so-called medical quality standards, like it's the outcome for the patient and which can be very different in different diseases. We also follow the customer quality and also the operational quality. Operational quality, meaning that we have swift processes, we have fast access to treatment, the lead time is fast, we avoid errors, we report them openly. We go through the errors so that we can learn them. We have an open culture for reporting and going through the errors at Terveystalo. By this way, we can be better every year after year. Finally, of course, also in our quality work, we recognize that customers need to be satisfied what we provide for them.
Of course, we measure net promoter score, what they report, and for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that's been higher than ever before. We also report the functional outcome of the operations that we do so that patient-reported outcomes, patient experienced outcomes, which is the grounding for the ICHOM standards that are followed by all major healthcare organizations globally. Finally, we've recognized that there's a new entity called clinicians' experience that is in the middle of all the quality work. Meaning that our professionals, so they need also be satisfied with all the facilities, with all the guidance, with all the ways that we work, and finally, with the open quality culture that we have at Terveystalo. Of course, we measure also the improved clinicians' experience. AI.
It's in the heart of detecting individuals who are at risk to develop some illnesses in later life or are at risk to be away from work, are at risk for sickness. The basis of our AI framework is in the electronic medical records that we have at Terveystalo. We have data from over 4 million Finns in our database. We perform over 3.5 million visits by doctors a year, and we've been able to develop algorithms based from our database of those over 4 million Finns, so that we can read out that in an easy format for the professional.
That we can recognize a person, for example, in a company who may be at risk for developing, for example, mental disorder that will lead to sick leave days, that are something that all the employers are worried nowadays, especially when it comes to working age younger people, some between 20 to 40 years. We also use a lot of questionnaires that our customers are answering in the system via Oma Terveys, all that's pooled together with these algorithms to make a good readout. Oma Terveys is an award-winning app. I won't go too much into details because we already discussed about that, it's good to remember that with Oma Terveys you can get access to your, for example, physician or to your nurse within seconds. You can get access to video appointment within minutes.
During the highest peaks of the pandemic, for example, yesterday, it took on average 38 seconds to go through, although we are having massive amounts of video appointments at the moment. It means also that a customer is having all the health information in his mobile app, carrying it everywhere. Results from, for example, mammogram screens, they can all be found from Oma Terveys. As I mentioned, the number of users has been increasing a lot during the pandemic. About this added value that we provide either for the patient or for the employer. I have two examples here. The first one is related to mental healthcare paths. This is something that is actually quite difficult to treat, and where it's crucial that the patient who is having a mental disorder has fast access to a professional.
The way we work with mental disorders is that our customers, they can access almost within seconds a professional through so-called Mielen Chat, a mental health chat. Then if it's recognized that further help is needed, very easy access help called Mielen Sparri can be implemented. These as two examples from two different companies, the other one with 2,000, the other one with 4,000 employees. We can reduce, in the first company, 12.5% sick leave days, and in the second company about 30% all sick leave days when our way of handling mental care is installed in the company. This is added value for the employee, no doubt about it. We have also followed how did it go with the patients.
With the patients with the depression index, we've been able to show that also the patients actually when going through this and having a brief psychotherapy period also there, they really feel better after this kind of program. Last slide before conclusions. What about risk factors for cerebral vascular diseases, risk factors for diabetes, and our Oma Suunnitelma, this own plan, how does it work? Do we get any benefits? It is globally recognized that in order to produce high-quality service for risk factors and to have them in good balance, you need to measure the balance of these risk factors. We have brand-new data when we have been following customers that where we have cholesterol and blood pressure levels available at least one year before the onset of making the first own care plan, and thereafter in the follow-up data available.
We've been able to show that these risk factors, for example, cholesterol and blood pressure, they are reduced the levels among 70% of all the customers. Meaning that the benefit that will end up in 15 or 20 years is likely to be received from the Oma Suunnitelma, and meaning that we have a world-class tool that we can use in the prevention of different disease in our hands. Finally, how we have tackled this pandemic. I think it's fair enough to say that for providers, COVID-19 has been a crisis. We took down, for example, dental services by 75% during the busiest months, and have ramped that back. We need to recognize that this will be the new normal, that we need to have some tests, but we need to take care of other diseases. We cannot leave them out.
In Finland, about 335 patients have died due to COVID-19, and last year, just to compare, 800 died due to suicide, 13,000 die due to cancer, 18,000 die due to cerebrovascular disease. We need to take care of these other diseases, too, at the same time. It's clear that COVID-19 has permanently changed the way customers get using digital tools to get access to healthcare professional. Actually, healthcare provider that will best survive in the future is someone that is having all these available tools, traditional hospital network, traditional locations for physical doctor's appointments, but also modern digital tools for very fast access to professional's appointment. Finally, I think, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we've shown that Terveystalo's company has the capability and we have the platform as well as ability to rapidly change our operations and solve the bottlenecks of possible supply.
I think with this, I will end up my presentation and happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you.
As a reminder, we also take questions through the webcast. If you have any questions at any time of the day, please post them and we'll present them when it's a suitable time. Do we have any questions for either Petri or Ville from the room at the moment?
While you are thinking about hard questions, which I challenged you to do earlier on, maybe just to further comment on Petri's presentation. I think this is a manifestation of the fact that we are not afraid of transformation. We are leading the transformation. There are aspects that, of course, we need to tackle on the way, but my smart colleagues will give some insights, for example, when it comes to pricing and packaging these new type of hybrid services. The traditional way of being passive, putting responsibility of organizing your own health path to customers and queuing from states, that's, I would say, long gone. New hybrid model will need to take over. As I said earlier, that's the one that it's in Terveystalo's DNA.
Can I ask you to take the question from there so that the webcast people can also hear?
All right. Thank you. It's Panu Laitinmäki from Danske Bank. I have two questions related to COVID-19, actually. First one on the test business or the testing volumes. Can you comment on the profitability of the testing business? How long do you expect this to continue? Is it like a one-off for this year, or will it be two to three years, as you said with COVID-19?
Well, traditionally, as you know, we don't comment the individual services because you can see the volumes, you can see the price points, and we can say that it's profitable. It's also very complicated process in fairly difficult circumstances to conduct. Not anybody can do it. As I said, it's a nice tailwind for our revenue side and also for the profits at the moment. When it comes to future testing activity, I have said that, and I guess we can all agree that when it comes to COVID-19 and forecasting the pandemic, everybody has been wrong. Agility is the key, and that was the fact that Petri was also talking about how you need to have the ability, you need to have the palette of different services, different tests.
From medical point of view, Petri told, of course, he's my best source of information. He told that he believes that a pattern of the pandemic is such that there's one big first wave, then there's continuous chain of smaller waves. That kind of scenario we are fully prepared for. In that kind of scenario, as Petri told, we need to be agile, we need to be speedy, we need to be on the pulse of the market all the time putting relevant services to the customers.
Okay, thank you. I also wanted to ask about the public sector queues being created in this situation. We can read almost on a daily basis from the Finnish press that there is a big backlog of services being created, and they will need private companies' help to clear that. Can you comment on that? What have you seen? What are your expectations? What kind of an opportunity will this be for the companies and you? Thanks.
Obviously, we do have capability. We do have the capacity. We do have ability to scale up even further, and we are more than willing to help public sector on this challenge. Thus far, the of them deals with public sector fairly sporadic. Short term. There's a constant dialogue between us and public sector, and there's phone ringing with Eeva and Petri every week. If not every day, somebody calls and wants to have tests. Thus far there has not been a proper large quota-based deal where public sector actually committed to the full service chain and a proper quota so that we can truly ramp up. I can say that there are discussions ongoing. As you said, we also feel that the best way to tackle this one, the best way to open bottlenecks, is to use our agility, our capabilities to help Finnish society.
Jutta Rahikainen from SEB Equity Research. I have two questions on the digitalization. The first one is that now that it's growing and it's really nice and cool that you actually now this is happening. What does it mean to your clinic network? Are we nearing a point where you actually will start closing down physical units? Do you think this omni or multi-channel type of thing will carry you through for years and years with the current clinic network to be there as well?
That's a great question. As I said earlier, we are believing in hybrid model. There are things that will need to be delivered physically for eternity basically. You cannot take blood sample, for example, through digital or anything like that. The deeper you go to an issue, the more specialized professional you have, typically you need to have face-to-face communication during the chain of these services. We strongly believe in hybrid model. What I stated earlier is this, that our platform is truly geared for that one compared to fully digital, who are now forced to move to brick-and-mortar, basically. We have at one point made some estimates how the digital appointments will over time take more role compared to physical appointments. There's a clear path and clear pattern how that's going to be evolve. It's going to be hybrid.
It's going to be more balanced between these two types of delivery. As I said, physical is not going to go anywhere. Good thing about Terveystalo network is that we have not asset-heavy company. We are asset-light. The facilities that we are using typically are rented and terms are typically quite flexible from our point of view. We actively are looking at demand-supply balance from a digital point of view and a physical point of view, and of course, more than willing to develop our network further. Even more important question is, maybe this is preemptive, maybe you're about to ask this one, but of course everybody's interested in profitability comparison between digital and physical. Again, I will refer to integrated care chains. That is our business. We are not afraid of this productivity boost by digital.
Proper combination in full care chains, proper products placed to the marketplace and for customers, and intelligent pricing, for example, intelligent packaging. That's the key for profitability.
Okay. That was not actually my second question.
Okay.
Thanks for that. My second question was on the usage of the digital services. I think we all agree that it's efficient and probably saves cost. We did speak about the private and corporate customers quite a bit. Could you walk us through the public customer segment? How much do they leverage this platform you have, if at all, really at this point? Thanks.
Yes, we do have case. Maybe you can, Petri, if you have any sort of.
Yeah.
Nice examples.
Maybe I can tell something else than rather than talk about chat or video appointments. For example, to remote areas, we serve public segment with these assisted video appointments, so that nurses, they're sitting in a room together with the patient. For example, in Hanko at the moment, the doctor is sitting in office room in Oulu and taking care of the patient there. These kind of services, so there's certainly larger demand also in the future. We have tools that actually, as a clinician, I can tell when you listen to lungs, you can hear better through the USB than you do with traditional stethoscope. It's not about techniques anymore. It's about the attitudes and how to use them as well as possible.
Just to continue shortly, there's a high demand for that type of services, obviously, because in many cases it is a no-brainer. It's very difficult to get a doctor from Helsinki to move to, let's say, let's call it Savukoski or whatever. Through digital and with this kind of assisted model, you can do it easily. The inertia on public side is more on sort of local politics because there's still some romance in there, so that you need to have your own doctor in your own community, which is nice, and of course, doctor's family, et cetera. That's something that we can see in bids and in a way, public organizations' requests for the service. It's going to evolve over time.
Thanks. Let's take some time for questions, even though we're running a bit behind. That's fine.
Yes. Iiris Theman from Carnegie. Just one question. It seems that your process is very efficient, and you provide very high-quality care. What is your weakness? Where do you see that you have room to improve? Thanks.
That's sort of a tricky question. I would call weaknesses potential, and it's potential for this industry and not for Terveystalo. I would say that we are leading in this development, but obviously, when we are discussing in more detail our strategy plans and implementation, you can call any potential that we are presenting also a weakness, because this industry traditionally, it's still sort of a handicraft tradition, handicraft driven, and distilling full commercial and operational potential is still fairly far away as an industry as a whole.
Maybe I can comment here also that if we go to specialty care, so we have 50 different specialties within medicine, and of course, since we are operating throughout the country to be able to provide a specialist everywhere. Now with these new tools, it will help us. We need to remember when it comes to specialty care, so patients are really used in those cases to go to a traditional doctor's appointment and how to be able to have traditional appointments and change their patient's behavior so that they can meet, let's say, a dermatologist via an e-visit. It's certainly something that is difficult to have, for example, in every small location in Finland, a dermatologist. With e-tools, so we can provide that.
I think we'll move ahead with the agenda, and then we'll take questions after Ville's next presentation then.
Okay. If I may, Kati, continue straight away. All right. Let's move on to the next phase in presentation and also next phase in Terveystalo story. We have been talking about the integrated care chains and integrated platform model. That's something that we are going to repeat throughout the day. First, there are maybe, especially over this webcast, there are people who don't know Terveystalo that well. Very shortly, the history of Terveystalo and structure of Terveystalo. Terveystalo today is a leading platform for healthcare and wellbeing services in the Nordics with over EUR 1 billion revenue last year and industry-leading EBITDA margin. We do have vastest network when it comes to physical, but also best access to digital in this marketplace. We have a balanced split between three different revenue streams and three different payer groups.
Largest business still being corporate business with over 40% of our revenue, then rest is nicely split between public and then private. What we have been saying many times already, myself and Petri as well, is that we are dealing with integrated care chains. That's important to understand, especially outside Finland, where this is not the tradition. Finnish healthcare system has basically educated us to do so. In Finnish healthcare system private pay out of the pocket market and also corporate market, they are over-represented, and on the other hand public pay private provision is under-represented. This has led to a model where sort of we are truly following customer needs, truly following customer's wallet as well, and in a dynamic manner delivering full service packages to different customers. This is in our DNA. This is important to understand.
This is also best way to get industry-leading margins and protect them going forward. Terveystalo is actually a platform. It's fairly fashionable to talk about platforms, but when thinking about Finnish healthcare system, Terveystalo's position in Finland, we have been a platform for a long time. It used to be physical. We connected private practitioners to our physical appointment facilities, gave access to labs, imaging, and then more specialized services. On the other hand, we have been, as I said before connecting through this platform, these services to individual customers and corporate customers, and of course, also public, but these two first customer groups, they have led the development to where we are today. This truly is integrated platform with the ability to mix and match between customer types, different services, and deliver needed service in seamless manner.
Terveystalo history in short, again, for those who don't know, this is very nice story. Really a classic. Started modestly as many of the other unicorns also. First gain scale, that was the first phase. Terveystalo conducted some 200 acquisitions over the years. Early on started to centralize functions and hence, improve the synergies between different entities. The ability to integrate new entities to this mothership was improved over time. Third phase, automate and digitalize, which as I mentioned earlier, has been going on for quite many years. Terveystalo has been a front runner in that field in Finland, and Finland is a leading country in many aspects when it comes to delivering this type of healthcare service. Latest phase, so to speak, is personalize.
There we start touching upon truly commercialized world, in positive sense, so that we are able to really deliver individual service for different customer segments and even individual customers. There we do have a lot of focus currently. Growth story numbers. Terveystalo growth has been, since 2014, 17% annually. Obviously beating the market growth by far. Equally important is that it has been profitable growth all the time. EBITDA, in absolute terms, have developed nicely over the years. Looking more precisely into the organic growth once I get the slide back. As I said, 17% overall growth during these years, out of which 5.6% is organic. Even comparing this 5.6% to total market growth annually, 2.1%, you can see that we have basically tripled the growth rate of the marketplace. That's based on our capabilities, our competitive edge, but also market consolidation.
Market consolidation has benefited us, and there's no reason to think that this would change going forward. The further the market consolidates, the bigger ones who are better prepared, for example, this digital transformation, get a bigger share of the pie going forward. Obviously, we have not only integrated and acquired companies. With those integrations, of course, it's worth noting that 200 acquisitions over this time period, it something like one in one month, basically. That's a fairly high rate. Somebody could think that inside, under the hood, it's a mess, but quite the contrary. Terveystalo has been able to invest in capabilities and develop its operations and commercial front at the same time with a speedy manner. As Petri pointed out, one example from that one is our customer satisfaction. At the moment, it's record high, 83 for our appointments.
For our surgeries, for example, it's way higher, this is the most important and relevant customer experience metrics that we are using. That's developing very nicely. At the same time, we have been able to provide world-leading access to care, as Petri explained. During H1, the average waiting time for getting to a practitioner was seven seconds, 24/7. Not too bad. That's also the future of healthcare. Nicely done. What has made this possible to be able to grow and be profitable at the same time with the industry-leading margins? Two very important aspects. One, very traditional, which is high operating leverage. New customers with the growth typically for Terveystalo come in with a very nice high margin. That's continued to be the case also when we are in the future expanding the service portfolio, which Eeva will discuss later today.
Even more and more important going forward is the ability to benefit from our vast database and our vast knowledge about our customers. First of all, we do have 700,000 contracted customers giving us a great place to sell and provide additional services cross-sell. We do have more than 4 million individuals in our patient records. Not everything, but very close to that landmark. That's still a quite underutilized resource in our commercial operations. Eeva will discuss in detail how we see our vast customer base translating into more visits, more services, and then, of course, more additional revenue. Important clarification maybe is proper at this stage. When we are talking about Terveystalo platform and traditional Terveystalo DNA, we are talking about part of Terveystalo, which is built for fee-for-service, private and corporate business, and public service sales.
Its operation and network is integrated entity. We are providing services for these different customer groups from the same integrated network, be it digital or physical. On top of that one, we have two add-on businesses under our portfolio. Namely, public outsourcings, which have been thoroughly discussed in Finland lately, and then staffing business. In revenue numbers, Terveystalo platform, as we call it, is EUR 800 million, and staffing EUR 100 roughly, and outsourcing is EUR 100 roughly. This is important distinction to understand because when we are talking about our strategy, when we are talking about capabilities, when we are talking about future of healthcare, Terveystalo platform is where all the innovation is happening because that's fast-moving, consumer-driven platform and marketplace. There we have individuals who are paying with their own money, highly demanding customers. We have insurance company, highly demanding customers, and corporates, highly demanding customers.
There, as we invest and as we develop, the speed of change and transformation and innovation is very high. Capabilities that we develop there can be then further, of course, utilized and sold to the public organizers. When we are talking about public outsourcings, just a couple of minutes ago, we discussed public organization and public sites' need, for example, for remote services. The need is there, but it's of course a slower-moving world. Another important aspect and takeaway from this one is that our strategy has always been focused on Terveystalo platform. We have not speculated on any Sote model, social and healthcare reform in Finland, even though the, as I said earlier, public pay, private provision is underutilized in this market.
There's nice upside there, and at one point, if this opens up, we are, of course, ready and willing to add our services there, but our strategy is not based on any specific model. When it comes to volumes, and if you try to model, for example, outsourcing related questions to Terveystalo, outsourcing represent, as I said, roughly EUR 100 million of revenue. As you can understand, in outsourcing business, of course, the margins are way lower than in this other part of the business. From margin point of view, way lower than this 10% that you can see on the revenue. Still, a nice add-on, value-adding part of our business. If this then grows in the future based on any new Sote reform, we are ready. We are willing to use our capabilities there, and we can scale up fast.
I think that's often discussed topic with Terveystalo and Finnish healthcare system. I think it's important to note and understand. Maybe still commenting on that one even though we are talking about strategy. Public side do have bottlenecks. Everybody here knows that one. There's been a lot of thinking around how to solve those, and every time the answer is the same: use more private services. Even though we don't speculate the Sote reform or Sote model, we can agree that the only way to really solve this issue is to use, for example, Terveystalo more going forward. For Terveystalo platform, in our strategy, we have seen nice growth pattern during last couple of years. Future sources of growth are still market and share growth, even more importantly, growth in share of wallet, which especially Eeva will discuss in more detail going forward, and then still continued M&A.
Right now, of course, it's quite difficult to put any estimate on market recovery and volumes, for example, next year or following year. Underlying trends supporting healthcare and demand for healthcare services, as we have discussed, are there, and they are becoming even stronger as we are passing this crisis. Another aspect is that as I told already, we have been able to triple the overall market growth over past years, and as I said, the further the market consolidates, we are, in our opinion, going to get, in the future also, more than our fair share of the growth. One aspect related to overall growth is, of course, our capacity. We are talking about limited resources, namely professionals. We have great recipes and tools to tackle that challenge going forward. Niki Kotilainen actually will discuss those in his presentation.
The growth in shared wallet, this is, as I said, underutilized area in healthcare, underutilized data, and underutilized packaging of services. Continued M&A. There are, of course, a diminishing number of targets in Finnish healthcare sector when it comes to our core services. There's quite many opportunities when it comes to adjacencies in more wellbeing-leaning sectors like mental health and physiotherapy, just to name a few. That's going to be still on our agenda, and as explained before, we do have a great machine to conduct these acquisitions and integrate them into the Terveystalo platform. The next phase. We all, I guess, read different descriptions of megatrends, when thinking about Terveystalo and future of healthcare, it's, I think, proper to stay for a while with the megatrends that we have described here. Digital, we have discussed thoroughly already.
What it means, at the same time, when processes and services become more digital, is that the requirement from the customers, they get higher. Services in this industry are not only compared with the services within same industry by other player. Our digital services will be compared with, you name it, Amazon or whatever. Speed of development and innovation needs to be faster than before. Empowered consumer. I talked earlier about the traditional handicraft-driven model where healthcare provider is passive and consumer is busy trying to find the right professional and right service. That's soon going to be long gone. We need to have analytics data to fast detect what is the best first service for a certain customer, and then really effectively lead him or her through the care chain. Dis trustful consumer is one of the trends. Obviously, we will need more data.
We will need to be more open. People are even carrying their own data to doctors' appointments. We need to have sort of, even though we believe in hardcore medicine, we do need to have open interface for this new type of information. As discussed earlier already, holistic health and wellbeing is becoming a thing. People are thinking about themselves as one sort of unified human being, and there's one health and wellbeing. Ability to mix and match right services for individual from these two baskets will be very important. People are going to live longer, so certain disease types will increase in numbers, and continuous relationship between healthcare provider and patient or customer becomes a trend and sort of a new normal. Depleting resources, as I said, we have seen with the COVID-19 crisis, decrease in demand early on, but that's of course temporary.
We will come back to a world where everybody is competing for the best resources, and our ability to also in the future recruit the best brains, best talent will be a key. Changing employee expectations, especially relevant to our occupational healthcare services. Coming back to the Terveystalo platform model, how that relates to the megatrends and how that relates to our new phase and strategy. This platform model, which we have developed over time, first of all, I would say that it's future proof. That's the way to organize healthcare services also in the future. It's very nice thing that it's already in our DNA. What needs to happen also with Terveystalo, Customer interface need to take leaps forward really fast. As I said, Eeva will discuss those in detail.
There are endless opportunities with better knowing your customer, utilizing your data, combining different services to be a better provider for your customers and also increase your revenue. Under the hood inside this box inside this platform, we, as any provider, will need more intelligence, more integration, better processes, hybrid models between physical and digital, and better customer steering. Better ability to match demand and supply, and also pricing intelligence, commercial intelligence. Actually, these are the two elements that are visible in our updated strategy. The wording that we are using for the strategy is, first of all, when I mentioned this looking under the hood and adding in intelligence, we can call it engine room, for example. The wording is Terveystalo will become smartest platform in the industry. As said, Niki Kotilainen will discuss this area in detail.
This is not headlines, as I said initially. We have robust plans in place already under implementation. First good examples already delivered. A customer health partner, which represents re-innovating the interface between ourselves and consumer. That's expanding the pie, so to speak. We need to be able to increase our service portfolio to well-being. At the same time, we need to be engaged, we need to be active. We cannot be passive member of this relationship anymore, just waiting that somebody pops up. We need to have active dialogue. We need to have proper segmentation in place. We need to have proper packaging of the services, and we need to be able to present these services in proper commercial manner. Selective M&A, as discussed before, more on the well-being side going forward in this marketplace. There are still some opportunities in our core healthcare sector.
This smartest platform of the industry, health partner for your customer. Nice headlines, lot of implementation underneath. We do have talented colleagues here who will discuss each and every topic in more detail from operational, commercial point of view and customer engagement point of view. At this stage, I will conclude my session with some takeaways. Terveystalo as a healthcare provider and company today. First of all, extremely good track record in generating growth and profitability, beating the market constantly both from margin point of view and growth rate point of view. Very important going forward is to have this future-proof platform model, which is asset light and can integrate different services, different professionals with different customer groups. Updated strategy will basically leverage our capabilities but will take Terveystalo a leap forward when it comes to intelligence, really distilling operational and commercial potential out of this system.
By doing that, I'm sure we'll lead the way for healthcare in more general. Thank you.
Thanks, Ville. Mic on? Yes. Maybe we'll stop here for a moment for one question from the webcast or actually three interrelated questions from Alex Gibson from Morgan Stanley. First of all, given the strength of your digital offering and infrastructure, are you considering how you could capture more value from it by taking it abroad and addressing a more global patient basis? Secondly, if our capacity to bring the ground healthcare services, I assume he means the network that we have here locally, is a limiting factor to go abroad. Could we instead license that technology and/or partner with the local healthcare providers, or is it integratable to other service providers' platforms?
Okay. Digital capabilities and their scalability internationally, that was the first part. What we are doing here, for sure, is we are building a scalable platform. That's not market-specific as such. At least 90% of the content is not market-specific. Right now, what we are concentrating on is really perfecting the engine room, reinventing the engagement layer with our consumers. We are not in any hurry to start scaling it up front. To the question, yes, for sure, we are building. We are not only living with the growth forecast and matching those. We are building a truly scalable platform. Licensing the.
Yeah, is it something that we could partner with someone who has the local facilities outside Finland and just bolt on our digital capabilities into that one?
Well, I would say that's for sure a possibility. Terveystalo has been active with M&A for years, and Terveystalo knows the neighboring markets as well very well. If at some point there would be a value-adding match, that would be, of course, very interesting for Terveystalo.
Thanks. Do we have any questions from the room at this point, or shall we continue? Panu, go ahead. If you could just use the mic again.
It's Panu Laitinmäki from Danske. I have a question on this strategy, and related to public sector exposure. You highlighted that the strategy is based on your platform and the public side is bit of an add-on. Less than two years ago, you did a sizable acquisition of Attendo healthcare operations. Has this kind of view on the public sector changed? Is it related to the Sote reform, or how should we think about that you made a big bet on the market, and now it seems that you're not really focusing on it that much?
Maybe it's sort of an understatement that we are not focusing on public segment. It's a value-adding business. We are interested in the deals that are floating out there. When we are active in that business, of course, we are interested in that business. My point was that the corporate-driven, private-driven, insurance company-driven part of the business is the one which is leading the innovation and development going forward. Then we are able to use those scalable element from this mothership to public segment. Of course, public segment is highly interested in those. The point is more that this ship doesn't change course based on any Sote model. We believe that we are building a robust and a scalable platform, which is applicable for different customer segments going forward, regardless of what politicians decide.
Iiris, go ahead.
Yeah, Iiris Theman from Carnegie. Just regarding your 5% long-term sales target-
Does that include acquisitions, or do you see that the Finnish healthcare market would provide you a 5% growth organically?
Our updated targets for the strategy period state 5% as growth target, including basically everything. Ilkka will touch upon that one in more detail, and also levers how we believe we will get there in the last presentation of today. Hold your breath. It's going to be fantastic.
Thanks. I don't see any other Oh, sorry. Please, Antti, go ahead.
Hi, it's Antti Rautava from OP Markets. As you talk about the M&A.
Your core business and the wellbeing business, do you see any differences in profitability between these two businesses, or are they the same level, or how would you describe them? Thanks.
Well, when you think about M&A logic and these new adjacencies, the same sort of virtues apply. There's a high operating leverage, and we can bolt these new type of services into the same platform. From M&A perspective, it's no different than the core services. If you think about services as such and their margins, as I said earlier, we have not disclosed any margins or pieces of this pie and their margin. Again, I will refer back to integrated care chains and their profitability. That's our business model.
I think that we're good now, and then we can move ahead with the better solutions with the smartest platform in the industry with Noora and Niki.
Now it's time to get really excited because now we have young and fresh brains, even though with a lot of experience from relevant industries coming up with fresh solutions.
Thank you, Ville. Hopefully, we can live up for the expectations.
I'm sure.
Hey, it's very nice to be here. My name is Niki Kotilainen. I'm the Director of Operations. With me, I have Noora Härmä, who will then continue after me and tell more details about our price initiatives. I'm going to tell you more about the smartest platform and what we mean by it, in more detail. However, before going there, let me introduce myself. As Kati already mentioned, my journey with Terveystalo started eight years ago, 2012, when I was working at the Boston Consulting Group. We were helping Terveystalo at the time to update their strategy, as the end result of that kind of project, Bridgepoint sold Terveystalo to EQT. After a couple of years of consulting after that, I joined Terveystalo in 2015 as a head of PMO, basically following EQT's value creation agenda for a couple of years until the IPO.
Since then, I have had various roles within Terveystalo. I'm currently operating as director of operations. Basically, what I'm going to say today is more from the perspective of the machine room or operation engine as Ville referred earlier. Starting from the conclusions or takeaways from this presentation, you already heard many times about how Terveystalo is the kind of industry leading in terms of operative efficiency. Of course, we want to keep that going forward. What I want to mention about the efficiency is also what Petri mentioned, basically. Efficiency, it's not only profits. Operational efficiency means that you get into COVID test fast, and you get the results fast. It's also customer experience, and it's also about medical quality. It's not all about, kind of for you investors, meaning operating profits, but it's also something else.
However, in order to continue on that path, we need to tackle a couple of those key trends that Ville already discussed earlier, and especially how those influence our operations and this operational machine. The good thing is that if we tackle the trends right, we can continue on this path and also improve the customer experience. Now let me go through in more detail a couple of those trends and how we are going to then tackle these changes. Basically, Ville went through a bunch of mega trends. On this slide, we can see three that are selected from the operational perspective.
When I started to work with Terveystalo eight years ago, to simplify, just to make a point, how that company and other private healthcare companies in this industry in Finland worked was basically waiting for patient to get sick, and then helping him or her, and then with fee-for-service model, billing every visit. During years, and especially during the COVID-19 crisis, of course, we can see that there is a new type of demand for different types of services, customer relevant services, whether they are then target prices or fixed prices or what Petri said, this kind of value-based or outcome-driven models. There is increased demand for new types of services. Of course, when we have a new type of service or contract, we also need to update our operative model a bit.
The second topic here is the shortage of healthcare professionals, meaning that not only we want to get the best healthcare professionals to support our growth, but it's also who should go to whom with which condition. Thirdly, as also Ville mentioned, there is increasing demand for digital services. The benchmark is not companies in our industry. The benchmarks are somewhere else. I bet many of you guys have smartwatch, not necessarily right now, but at your home where you can track sleep or you can track how many steps you take. That's a health data as well. The benchmark on how convenient it is, what kind of recommendations you get from your device is in terms of your health, that bar is actually set by other industries. We need to be able to match that to continue to win in this business environment.
What are we aiming for? On a title level, it's easy, of course. Offer the most relevant and convenient service to the customer. The tricky part is that we should be able to do it as stated here, kind of regardless of time, place, channel, and from the beginning, meaning the first touch point to the end of the care chain. Let me walk you through this slide. Here we have a illustration of a care path. Once again, I'll go back eight years ago, in a different world where basically, our industry assumed that the customer is a healthcare professional. Meaning that if you have a stomach ache, we assume that you know whether you need to book a time, whether you need to book the time for a doctor or a nutritionist.
Once you have booked the time, then of course, we and others, we have the Platform and the right professional, and then we treated you. Going forward, we need to be better at understanding what is actually your service need. We can guide you that, "Hey, actually, based on what you just told digitally, you should go to nutritionist, and you can actually take the first contact via an online channel." After that appointment, there is a Oma Terveys platform and application that will guide you forward on that care path. Basically, we have had all the steps, all the years, but what we are aiming for now is to be, as Ville said, to integrate this care path in a better way, that is more kind of convenient for the customer and improves the customer experience as well.
As a director of operations, the key question is how to do this in a scalable way? Personalizing the care. There's a timeline with this. Our solution is this so-called smartest platform. The objective is to offer that personalized service, regardless of time and place and channel, in a way that optimizes also our business at the same time. Let me walk you through the slide once again. Let's start from the right-hand side. You can see a funnel. Maybe many of you have seen this already. A typical funnel of a private provider in Finland, in healthcare industry, basically starting from the physician appointment and then moving onwards to laboratory and imaging and surgery, and so on. Traditionally, everyone has gone first to the doctor, and that, in some cases, have become a bottleneck.
When we are talking about the smartest platform, we want to do four things. First of all, we want to build these kind of so-called system layers that steers the customer to the right place. Maybe bypassing the physical appointment, maybe doing the physical appointment via digital channels. Of course, we will continue on expanding the kind of traditional bottlenecks in terms of when it comes to our supply and add some new kind of features to that as well through new technologies and so on. Thirdly, once you have had the appointment, we want to be more rigorous on how we are managing your care path going forward.
Building care guidelines and then implementing these kind of centers of excellences to kind of follow up on those care guidelines to ensure that you know what happens next and that you actually do the next visit, so to say. Of course, fourthly, we want to build and continue building new offerings that are market relevant, but also increase our competencies in pricing those. Let me walk you through the number one, two, and three, and then Noora will continue on number four. If I start from the first ones, the system layers. Basically what we want to do is optimize the customer flow. If I use few examples. Basically when a customer is contacting us, we need to understand the layer one, so to say, is what is your service need and how acute the need is.
Using the previous example of stomach ache, once again, do you need to go to a doctor? Is it actually nutritionist that you need to see? In order to do this better in future, we are going to or we have already, but in future we are increasingly focusing on building care need assessment capabilities, whether they are chat to a nurse during a booking process or an AI-based care need assessment tool. The second layer is basically then who is the right professional for your need. Once again, personalizing this path. To take another example, I'm a father of two small children. Maybe I need to see a pediatrician on Sunday, but there is none available. Who should I go to with the kind of problem that I have?
Maybe we find a suitable ear doctor who is willing to take one-year-old patients, who has the equipment that are small enough in that room where he or she is operating right now. We can find a right professional for your need. Once again, key actions going forward. Of course, we have that info already. We use it in our online booking. We have used it years. We can be better in utilizing that data, better in updating that data, and better integrating that data with the understanding of your need. Third layer, who is paying and are there any other kind of restrictions or service promises that we need to deliver? Let's take another example. If you have a small piece of trash in your eye, do you need to go to a nurse, to a doctor, or to an eye doctor?
Maybe your employer doesn't, your contract doesn't cover the eye doctor, but it does cover the nurse or the doctor. In the booking process, we steer you to the right professional once again. Lastly, and this is kind of my personal favorite, is the kind of which available appointment time we want to offer you. At Terveystalo, Monday mornings are typically the most busiest times during the week. Let's say you want to go to a doctor before your workday. You want to go at eight o'clock. Typically, we run out of time. Who will get the kind of last available appointment time. If your medical need is not acute, but it's convenient for you to get that timing. Who is the one who should get that time?
Previously we have been basically giving the times for those who have been fastest in booking them. Going forward, we need to be more intelligent in terms of what kind of service model you have and what kind of contract you have, whether you get the most wanted time or not. These are just examples and there are several key actions on the slide. For instance, for the last layer, we want to build this kind of revenue management capabilities to better take into consideration the demand and supply on that hour, on that unit, on that specialty with that need. Making it more dynamic in terms of timing. The second topic where we continue to focus is of course resourcing, so that we have the resources to support our growth targets. Of course, there are a couple of aspects.
First of all is winning and keeping the talented professionals that we have today and what there are in the market. Of course, we were discussing the Attendo earlier. Through Attendo we got the staffing business. Staffing business is mostly focused on young professionals. That's one way to get more talented people to work at Terveystalo. The second kind of category then there is the smart resources. Utilizing technology and once again AI to better use the resources and talented people that we have today. The third category is then how to ensure the high-quality care and then again that your care chain doesn't break up, so that there is the kind of control visit or you come to the visit that was planned. We have two elements that we are going to focus on to achieve this.
First one is care guidelines and the second is centers of excellence. I'm sure Petri can agree on what I'm going to say here, but care guidelines are something that are not invented by Terveystalo. They are basically nationwide recommendations how you should treat different diseases or diagnoses. Physicians widely recognize those. What we want to do is follow them in more rigorous way. It doesn't mean that we haven't followed them earlier. We have had, as Petri said, very high medical quality and I have here the "Laatukirja," our quality book as well. We have been tracking those for years. What we want to do next is basically make it more systematic through our IT systems as well.
Basically if you get diagnosed as type 2 diabetic for instance, there is a list of things that you need to take care every year, whether they are, if I remember correctly, four to six different lab tests annually and couple of checkups that you need to do in order to make sure that you are in good condition. Focusing on those, making sure that those will happen has a significant potential in terms of medical quality but also in terms of visit. The second term here on the slide is centers of excellence. Those are basically, as the slide says, kind of physical and virtual centers that manage these care paths and provide also a community for professionals that they can share new knowledge and learn.
This is, once again, if the staffing, the starting point in your career, but basically being part of this kind of center of excellence and being the driving force in one of those is for the more experienced professionals, attracting once again more professionals to work for us. There are other benefits as well. Of course for the patient or end user, it's higher quality of care. For Terveystalo, it's better compliance to those care guidelines, generating medical outcomes and visits as well. We have planned that we start with six centers of excellence during this strategy period. We are still with these. We are more or less in planning mode, but going through implementation soon. Last slide on my section.
To conclude, basically, if we are able to build more intelligent platform, meaning that these pieces that I just described, make them into more kind of smarter entity, integrate these steps in a better way, there are many benefits for the customer but also for profits as well. There are a couple of examples. I'm not going to go through them all, but to give you some kind of idea on how does this influence. First of all, being more personalized during booking process will definitely improve our conversion. If we have 10 million contacts to our call center and online booking, improving conversion or booking rate or conversion rate, of course, improves our sales. The example of the centers of excellence.
In the quality book, we have stated that our objective for the metric that how large share of patients with depression or anxiety will get referral to a short-term psychotherapy. That's one key metric. Petri was giving you earlier an example of two companies gaining huge benefits for sending people to short-term psychotherapy. Our last year's number was 0.8% of all of those who get that kind of a diagnosis, will get a referral to short-term psychotherapy. Our stated goal is 10%, so that's twelvefold the current ratio, and there's no reason why to stop to that one. You can all understand that if we tenfold referrals on that one specific example, what it mean if we take 10 most common diagnoses? You can understand why this is meaningful as well.
Let me stop here, and let me hand it over to Noora, who will then tell you how pricing is essential part of this platform.
Thank you, Niki. My name is Noora Härmä. Really happy to be here today, and I'll talk to you about our plans to further improve profitability and drive growth via pricing. I recently joined Terveystalo, and my professional background is within revenue management and pricing, mainly from the passenger transportation industry, meaning airlines and rail operator. I've also worked as a management consultant, helping different companies develop their pricing. To start off with my definition of revenue management. In my opinion, it's really about offering the right service to the right customer at the right time, at the right price, and through the right channels.
The travel industry has long been considered a forerunner in this practice because they work in an environment characterized by perishable inventory and restricted capacity, fluctuating demand from different kinds of customer segments with different needs and also different willingness to pay, and also an environment of intense even global competition. The airlines and also to some extent, hotels, they've been working with revenue management since the 1970s, and since then, the practice has spread to also other industries, for example, e-commerce. I see that when you start thinking about it, healthcare actually shares many of these same features. We cannot offer yesterday's slot to a customer today, and at times we also have restricted capacity. Sometimes a specialist in one area is fully booked for the day or even a week.
Also the demand fluctuates by month or week or day of week or even time of day, but Niki was saying that Monday mornings are often very busy. We also operate in a fairly competitive environment. We really see a lot of potential for the smart and considerate application of revenue management and pricing practices also within healthcare. Niki's examples about optimizing customer flows is really our interpretation of revenue management. Revenue management and pricing are really two sides of the same coin, and now I'll talk to you more about the pricing side. I know many of you may be thinking that, "Are they going to make their pricing all dynamic now? Isn't that what the airlines do and the travel industry is famous for?" My answer is no.
I think there's many other aspects to pricing in these industries and other industries that we can benefit from and learn from. When you start pricing a product or a service, there are different lenses you can use to approach the problem of what price to set. You can either start from basing the price on just covering your costs and adding on some kind of a margin, you can have a thorough look at your competition and see what the competition is offering and at what kinds of price points. You can also aim to price for value delivered. Actually, in reality, you have to do all three. You have to make sure that you understand your cost drivers and that you are aware of what the competition is offering.
In order to really price for value, you have to make sure that you really understand your customers' needs and are creating a value proposition that really meets those needs. In my experience, when I've worked with different industries like airlines and rail operators, for example, it really means that the service design and the pricing people really need to collaborate from an early stage in any development project in order to make sure that the value propositions are really clear, that they meet the needs of the customers, but also that there's a thorough understanding of the willingness to pay of those customer segments, and that you end up really developing a product or a service which is also commercially viable.
Pricing also has a role in supporting sales to make sure that the sales is also able to communicate the value to the customers and the benefits and not just focus on the features of the service or product in question. I'll show you a few examples from other industries and share some ideas on how these concepts could be applied to healthcare.
The first example is branded fares, which is what airlines adopted when they sensed the need to really shift from physical sales channels with travel agents selling the fares and moved on to online digital sales channels, which were first primarily the airline's own website and later also their mobile applications. Examples of flights are really, they are sadly few and far between at the moment, but in this example, we have an airline selling tickets from our Lake Saimaa region to Berlin, and it offers four different types of categories or fare types to choose from. The one on the left is the value fare starting at EUR 24.99. It only comes with one small cabin bag included. Then you see the regular and the plus and all the way to Flexi Plus with more and more benefits and features being added to the fare type.
The Flexi Plus is then the most flexible one with, for example, advanced seat reservation and fully flexible fare type. It's the most flexible option. The idea here is to clearly display the options that there are and make it as easy as possible for the customer to find the fare type that really suits their needs, whether it's a focus on the lowest cost or lowest price available or a fully flexible fare type. On the right-hand side, you see what we have been working on at Terveystalo. We also have an existing service offering for our occupational health customers, where we have different kinds of packages. Of course, healthcare is much more complex than the airline fare types.
What we see is that we have a lot of potential to still enhance how we display these products and services and how we communicate where is the value in the value-based healthcare that Petri was talking about. What kind of an impact can you have by choosing a certain type of package for your employees?
And if I may add on the?
Sure.
On the right-hand side, from the operational machine perspective, the trick here is that each of these are kind of modular. If you take the contract, Sujuva, we know what it includes. Not all the contracts are different, but they are modular, so it's easier for the kind of operational machines understand that now there is a customer with this type of contract, rather than every contract is a different type of work.
It's very true. It's a good point because the pricing and the product and the service and the operations, they all have to know what they're talking about and offer the same consistent service then to the customer. We're also working on extending our offering to the occupational healthcare customers, where we're working on offering packages with fixed monthly fees, which would then be targeted especially to those customers for whom the predictability of their healthcare related spending is important. I don't think that this is in no way a threat to our existing business because it does not only mean that we have the very bare minimum product available, but we can also have different price points and different services included in the different packages.
Service level agreements in a way that.
Sure.
Who gets to a doctor within 48 hours or 24 hours or so on.
There's a lot of cooperation required between our teams when we work together to develop these new packages. The second example I have really highlights.
Takes a while.
Patience.
Patience. Okay. The second example highlights new pricing models. On the top left corner, you see our Helsinki Regional Transport Authority offering auto-renewing saver subscriptions. You don't even have to remember to renew your monthly subscription anymore. Of course, the idea is to make daily commuting by train, bus, or metro really easy and affordable and take away all the hassles related to buying a ticket. Of course, the aim is to also increase ridership and reduce the traffic congestion in the capital area by having people choose the public transportation instead of their private cars. On the bottom left corner, we have an example from e-commerce with Amazon Prime offering those super-fast deliveries for all the stuff people buy online. Plus, access to a wide range of digital entertainment, ranging from eBooks to music to movies, and also exclusive shopping deals.
All this comes with a monthly or annual subscription fee. This is also something that we see a lot of potential for because we have the extensive platform and we have a wide array of services that we could offer to especially our private customers for some kind of a subscription-based model to increase the loyalty of those customers towards Terveystalo, and also make really the health partnership reality. Some things that we're thinking about is that our private customers could get, for example, a cap on their service fees per year, plus discounts to selected services and access to a whole range of digital wellbeing related content. With this kind of new model, we really hope to incentivize people to think about preventive healthcare and wellbeing, and not only for themselves, but also for their family members.
To conclude, how will we really approach developing pricing into a core competence? What are we going to do in practice? I talked a lot about developing these new services or pricing models for the future, but I see that there's also significant potential in just making sure that we also price our existing offering competitively and in a structured manner. What we'll do is we'll work to further improve the transparency into pricing data to make sure that we can make fact-based decisions concerning our list prices and discount structures when doing the transactional customer level pricing, because even small changes there can have a very positive impact on both our revenues and profits without really compromising the customer experience at all. Of course, this requires clear roles and responsibilities, and that we have the right competencies and skills in place.
What we're actually doing is we're creating our own internal center of excellence around pricing. In my experience, pricing really is a function where success is very dependent on forming active relationships with those different internal stakeholders, all the way from marketing and sales to operations. I must say, I'm truly excited about this opportunity to work with this great team. It's exceptionally talented, and there's a lot of energy in Terveystalo at the moment, and it's really been a pleasure getting to know both the team and the company and the whole new industry. Thank you. I'll hand it over to Niki to conclude this section.
Basically, just to conclude, we need to work jointly basically with pricing and our service offering when it comes to our operative model. We need to do it in a way that is scalable while personalizing the service for the end customer. Being truly increasing our customer experience. Eeva will soon tell you more about how to become a health partner for you as an end user. From the operational and service and pricing perspective, this is our focus area as well, to maintain the operative margin that we have had earlier. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Nikki and Noora. I think it's a really fascinating area of development for Terveystalo and this industry as a whole. Do we have any questions from the room? Jutta, please go ahead.
Jutta Rahikainen from SEB. A question here on the implementation part and the people involved, and I am thinking about the private practitioners in specific. Is this a win-win, or is it possible that from a private practitioner point of view, new pricing models actually can be a threat to their either kind of earnings model or the patient volumes they will meet? How does it look from a doctor's point of view all this now discussed?
If I start from the kind of patient volumes. The challenge has been that there are some bottlenecks within the healthcare professionals. If we are better in steering the right customer to the right professional, they are actually getting the same volumes but actually getting more relevant patients. If I once again give you an example, it's very common for us that a special doctor like What is the term in English? Sisätautilääkäri.
Internal specialist.
Internal specialist is also doing appointments as a general practitioner. Once again, if you take the booking process, many times this kind of specialist will get patients that are actually more for general practitioners, and he is not seeing the cases that are related to your problems with your internals. Being better in steering patients actually improves, not only maintains the volumes, but improves the relevancy of the patients for the doctor as well.
Thanks. Any other questions from the room? I have one question for Noora. You have an extensive background in revenue management and pricing, and I'm not talking about Terveystalo specifically, but you've been also consulting companies on this area in different industries. Just in your professional view, what kind of potential are we talking about when you implement this kind of pricing and intelligence into a relatively immature industry?
Well, let's say this comment does not apply specifically to Terveystalo now. In my, let's say, pricing consultant experience, whenever we approached a customer as consultants, we always thought that it's generally possible to find opportunities to develop that will have anything from 1%-3% or 1%-4% impact on revenue if you plan well and you also implement fully. I think that was the magnitude, that anything less would be a disappointment.
Great. Thanks. We have one question from the webcast from James Vane-Tempest from Jefferies. Nikki, you mentioned in your highly illustrative example that there's a potential of EUR 25 million-EUR 40 million extra revenues from higher conversion rates. How often is the location of our facility a reason for the customer trying to book a time to go to the competitor? B, excluding the locations, what are the main reasons the customer would choose to go with a competitor that you could address?
It's impossible to share the magnitude, but of course, what we have said years, that the most important thing is availability. If you are in a need, if you get the treatment when you want it and where you want it, and now digital channel is one opportunity here, that's the main reason for your selection. Of course, we have contract customers like occupational healthcare customers who will come to us in a short term in any case. Once again, regarding this patient steering, for those who have more flexibility in choosing the provider within the short-term horizon, we want to ensure that on Monday mornings there is a time for you, so that you don't go to a competitor.
For the contract customers, of course, we want to keep our contract customers happy, so we need to find good times for them as well, but they work in a different way. The magnitude is difficult to say what is the magnitude in the decision-making, but as we have said for years, availability is the key.
Yes, absolutely. Thanks. Any other questions from the room to either Nikki or Noora? If not, we'll have a short bio break. It was scheduled to be a 20-minute break, but I think we'll settle with 10 and start with the scheduled time at 2:20 with the next presentation coming up from the second strategic focus area from Eeva Nyberg-Oksanen, who will talk about the health partnership with individual customers. Go ahead, Eeva.
Thank you, Kati, and good afternoon. My name is Eeva Nyberg-Oksanen. I'm Director for Strategy and PMO and in charge of our strategy implementation. I have a four-year background at Terveystalo. I was Head of Operations, and then for the last two years, been in charge of our laboratory diagnostics business unit. I have a 15 years experience in the healthcare sector, and maybe I could describe myself as being one of the first engineers that ventured into healthcare 15 years ago. Nowadays, there are quite a lot of engineers holding positions in healthcare, but at that time it was quite rare. Of course, together with Petri, we're pretty much the first also in Terveystalo, but also in the Finnish private sector to venture into COVID-19 testing. Trying new things and making them work is one passion. Today, well, there's two keywords.
There's health and partner, and to elaborate on health, we're building, and what I'm talking to you about is capturing this trend of health and wellbeing. Doing something new and something that we know already now through our three years experience in wellbeing, that it grows faster than Terveystalo as an average. The wellbeing market is polarized, but the demand for services grows. When I say polarized, it's kind of built on two different parts of where you need wellbeing services. There's the reactive wellbeing services of which Petri already gave nice examples, and actually Niki also touched upon those examples. To do with mental health issues, you kind of already have a diagnostic or a diagnosis, but you need therapeutic treatments, maybe not doctor treatments. We already know that there are large health risks in this area.
50% of Finnish working age people have some lifestyle disease, and the source here is the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and some other Finnish sources. We know that 75% of over 30-year-old Finns are overweight, or 10% have diabetes and so on. We have already, as the examples showed, and I will touch upon them again, we've created services for these situations. At the same time, there's that proactive low entry service, kind of doing something about it before you need to visit a doctor, and maybe before when it's just a risk, when it's something that you don't even know. You would just want to keep yourself healthy. There's nutritional trends, of course, wearables, tweaking your exercise and competing in triathlons and so on. Also visiting a yoga studio and unwinding down from busy, hectic life.
These are very different in a way in the look and feel, but actually the science is the same. It's just a different part in our kind of life where we need these services. What do we have already? Terveystalo has been for three years in the wellbeing services. We have a large pool of wellbeing professionals, from nutritional therapists to workability coaching. We ventured into all our pharmacies and have small booths in pharmacies, and we have digital services. Petri already showed results from two of our customers on this Mielen Chat and Mielen Sparri, so mental chat and mental sparring, I guess you would call. The idea is that it's very low entry, easy to accessible. The chat services, it's a 24/7 chat as all our chat services are. You have a quick access, and you discuss it with a nurse.
Maybe you're stressing your presentation today or whatever, and you chat with a nurse, and then they will forward you to a professional, and that would be the Mielen Sparri, where you have up to five video meetings with the same wellbeing professional, but it's a video meeting, it's remote, it's digital. It's preventative, it's goal-oriented program, but the point is that you use it not because you have a diagnosis, but before actually, so to prevent you from having sick leave or a diagnosis. These are products, services that we already have, and I guess in a startup language, I would say that we already have the product market fit. We have occupational health customers that are using these services. Now going forward, we just want to scale this to a larger customer base. If you look at Terveystalo.
Terveystalo is in the healthcare sector, primary health, primary care, secondary care. We're quite balanced in primary care. Primary care would be the general practitioners or clinics, kind of the basic Terveystalo. Secondary care would be when you, for example, need surgery. Wellbeing looks small for the private customers, but for occupational health sector, it's actually already half of the Finnish occupational health sector model. Our customers are more and more investing into preventive care. We have the tools, we have the services, we have the data, we have the artificial intelligence that Petri showed, and we are already using it to some of our occupational healthcare customers. That is what we want to build upon and just scale it to the next level and especially to the private sector.
We've been doing this for a while, we know that there are challenges and issues to be solved, and some of them we have already solved, but these are good to note. I don't know how many of you knew that we have these services. There may be some low awareness of wellbeing services still, a high price image. If you think of price image, you go to a COVID test and it's over EUR 200, you visit a doctor, it's over EUR 100. Maybe when you visit a therapist, you visit them 10x . The price per visit will be smaller, but it's a recurring event. We need to work on that, and that's what Noora was presenting earlier. Maybe factory-like remote, maybe clinic, it's kind of a sterile health facility, not a nice ambient yoga studio.
There's high barriers for purchasing, maybe also because you don't really know which therapist. Do I need to visit a doctor? Do I need to visit a therapist? Of course, Nikki will sell that for us. Then there's a perception of medical care, that it's more health than wellbeing. Of course, inside the firm, in the profession, there is a change of mindset. I know you'll ask me what the change will be, so I'll just kind of say it already now. The biggest change is going from reactive to proactive. Doing something based on risk, not when a person is already sick. Beforehand, it might be that everything's okay, it might not be, but acting now is better than acting later. That is quite a profound difference, the kind of the whole notion of risk for the medical community.
We are all able to tackle these. What are we offering? What is the way that we're building this to the next level after three years of experience? It's all around digital engagement and engaging the customer, the consumer, the person on the health journey and being a partner on that health journey. Expanding the digital platform. We have the Oma Terveys application. It's a door to all our services. In a sense, that's the platform that the customer sees. Bringing relevant content to that platform. You already have your test results and your appointments, and you can make an appointment, and you have your Oma Suunnitelma healthcare plan in this application. It also reminds you if you have to renew a prescription and so on.
It could be even more, and we've been already building some of these things, but it could have free content on issues to do with wellbeing, and maybe then you continue from there and find what you need. Personalizing services. We already do a health questionnaire. This is kind of in essence what the Evalua firm is doing, a digital health questionnaire for occupational health customers. Based on that questionnaire or something alongside that questionnaire, we can gather data and then return that data to the customer and kind of help and guide along that path what is needed.
Because we want to do this in affordable way and in a way that kind of it's easy to buy but also kind of easy to stay motivated and use these services if not on a daily basis, a weekly basis, or a monthly basis, we have to do it in a digital scalable way, which make it more affordable, but at the same time we're solving some of the bottlenecks of supply. The pool of professionals that we have can take care of a larger population. Just as an example, you only need to visit the therapist maybe every fifth time, and four out of five times you're able to do it with the Oma Terveys application and all that content and questionnaires and webinars and so on that are inside that. You kind of have a digital health coach. That's good. I pause.
Already now we have Oma Terveys app users. We have active app users, over 200,000. We have people using our digital appointments and reserving a time through our webpages and our app. We have over a million. Really active Oma Terveys users that visited and use the information in it are around 200,000. That's quite a large number for any company, and it's still just 1/6 of our customers that visit us once a year. We know that they spend twice as much when they're active. They're, of course, active in keeping themselves healthy, but they also get things out of our Oma Terveys app.
At the same time, yes, this is a way of getting a share of wallet, but when you invest in your health, when you invest in yourself, where Terveystalo, of course, helps, you also get better outcomes, as Petri showed. There's both the mental health care paths and then having this Mielen Chat, Mielen Sparri, that I just showed you, which you can access through the Oma Terveys application. Also when you do your personal health plan through Oma Terveys, which we call Oma Suunnitelma, or in English, My Plan, you get better results. There are health risks already in the whole Western world, but especially in Finland.
We know that we can help them. At the same time, based on our health questionnaire data, which again, is the Evalua data, we know that there's still 53% of the working-age population in our own data, our own occupational healthcare data that we have. Here we have 22,000 people that we evaluated. We know that they have one significant risk. If we use the traffic lights, they're red. 53% have one red in one of these areas. Again, they're pretty much the same as what I showed for the whole population based on Finnish Institute research. Weight and diabetes is 30%, mental health 17%, and pain and physical impairment 14%. When we combine, and that you have at least one, it's 53%. There's need to do it, and we have very good results, but we could be better.
It's all based on these health assessments and data. On top, there is the current model, and then the future model down there, and they're kind of linked. In a way, when we think about the way we operate, we always start with the appointment. Maybe we're better already this year, but we already start with an appointment to the doctor, and we gather this electronic medical record data, so patient data. We do some diagnostics based on that. That would be like the 1.2 million people that visit us. We do around less than 100,000 health questionnaires each year to some occupational healthcare customers. For some of them, we do a My Plan.
The data to those that followed through this whole chain, the results are very good, but we started too late, in a way. We should start from the health questionnaires. If we want to be preventive, want to be interested in wellbeing, we need to start with the assessment. In a risk management world, it's just called a risk assessment, and for us, it's a health risk questionnaire. Based on the results of this and third-party information, wearable data, might be diagnostics, and looking further into it, we can see if you're green, yellow, or red, and then help you along that path. If you are healthy, we just help you to stay healthy with different, might be even totally free content.
If you have health risks and you need to work on them, then you can visit a doctor and really go through the whole care chain. Then, of course, something in between. This changes also the way we gather data and how we use data. We are very good in using our EMR data, but we nowadays start from a doctor-centric data collection. We have more EMR data on our customers than this wellbeing data. Going up. Now we want to turn that around and start with helping each of our customer to stay healthy and understand what needs to be done, and kind of plan that health journey together with us. This helps us in personalizing the offering and really relevant offering. Sometimes it's free, and sometimes we do whatever it takes to get you healthy again.
If we can just, kind of an example, I was saying that we have 1.2 million customers that visited us in one year, and we have 0.8 that have visited us in the past two to three years. 2 million customers in this area that are, we could say they are Terveystalo customers, and they're loyal Terveystalo customers. If we can help them with the health issues, maybe between visits, maybe offering more therapeutic services after a surgery and so on. These are just examples. By a 10% increase in the average spend, that is already EUR 80 million. Customers that didn't really know that we have wellbeing services but actually are looking for scientifically based good services that our professionals are able to provide, and just 10% of these customers, maybe with a much smaller spend than our current customers, that is already EUR 40 million.
There are quite a lot of services if we are in this low-threshold, affordable services like referral-free laboratory tests or health checkups and so on, that we can offer for private customers that we do for occupational health customers, these checkups, but we don't do them that much for private customers. That would then be EUR 50 million. This, of course, requires new business models, new pricing models, new service design. We have, alongside our fee-for-service models that we have now, we have more low-entry services and also free services, and then work with Noora to combine these into subscription models for our loyal customers. This is pretty much what we're wanting to do to change the industry standards from very clinical healthcare to having a proactive role in promoting customer health.
There's one key element here is it has to be something that recurs. It has to be motivating. It's kind of investing a penny each day into your piggy bank, and that just becomes something larger than doing something big once a year. Small incremental steps, as in the wellbeing, micro-breaks and so on. We assist people in staying healthy with these small steps every day, motivating them with digital engagement tools, and also help with motivation to make our services accessible to everyone. Because sometimes the hardest step is that first step on the wellbeing path and the health path. We also ensure continuity of care. Each one of us, at some point in life, we're feeling very healthy, and then we're sick, and then we're healthy again, and we kind of are changing between these states. That's part of the whole health journey.
The Terveystalo platform, it's a winning one when we have the customer there. The customer has an active part in it. We're actually doing all this that we've been describing to help the customer stay healthy, and we're really a partner that gives them value. Wellbeing is, at the moment, it's around one-tenth of what we do. It's small, but it's vital. If you ask anybody or if I ask you're more well than sick, so it's a bigger part of our everyday life. In the future, we will look at the customer as a whole and health as a whole, and we tailor to that health and wellbeing journey to individual needs. The customer has an active role, and this is kind of important in the digital engagement model, has an active role in kind of defining what is healthy, what is enough.
The professionals that Terveystalo has are then kind of aligned around him or her and helping them achieve those goals. There's still a lot of unrealized potential within our wellbeing business. We already know what it is and what the obstacles are, but we already have plans on how to go forward and really scale them to a new level. It's all based on the digital engagement model, utilizing data, returning it to the customer, and helping them reach their own goals in a personalized way. We also take a proactive role, kind of as an industry, but also as a company, to ensure the continuity of care and also to react a bit earlier than later. Okay. Thank you. Time for questions.
Thanks, Eeva. Do we have any questions for Eeva from the room? Jutta, go ahead. I'll just pick up the webcast line in between.
Jutta Rahikainen from SEB. A question to make this all happen from a commercial point of view. Who is it who is pushing this message to your clients and potential new clients? Does this rely on the sales force or the account managers, as you probably call them in occupational healthcare? Are they incentivized to make sure that the client, the company mostly, I assume, then switches to a package or solution where the wellbeing is a part of that? This all is great. I'm just thinking about because it's also about changing habits, purchasing habits.
Yes, it is.
For the companies.
It is.
How to make it happen?
Well, I think there it's a combination of our director for private services and our occupational healthcare. We know that companies, they already now purchase many of these things for their employees, but they may not discuss with us within this occupational healthcare meeting about these services. We've actually been able to show the need for many of these services through data to many customers. Petri's example, they were big companies that have realized that they need to also spend a bit more than if, the Finnish word, what the Kela reimburses. They need to spend more on the wellbeing of their employers. It's combination of two. I think now that And we've got some good results with this tactic, that it's part of the offering, and we do bring them up in these meetings.
I think we need to now also make them even more, how do you say, look at the private sector in that sense, that they're even more for a consumer product, so that they really look nice, and they motivate you, and then who pays for that service might be diverse. More of the service design into the digital product.
Thanks. Any other questions from the room? I think I'm standing in front of the camera. If not, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Eeva, we'll continue with Ilkka's presentation, who will summarize how all this together combines into achieving our financial targets.
Yes. Good afternoon on my behalf as well. My name is Ilkka Laurila. I'm the CFO of the company. I have already joined Terveystalo back at 2012, and I've been CFO since 2015. My longer financial background is from EY, in which I mostly worked with the transactions. In that role, I also carried out of DD of Terveystalo while it was delisted at the end of 2008. I'm seeing the delisting of Terveystalo, two private equity rounds, listing the company, and now being a CFO of a listed company for three years. It's been a journey, I have to say. It's been a journey. In my presentation, like Kati told, I'll try to first summarize our recent development since the IPO, when it comes to the financials.
I will try to summarize what is the logic and the impact from those presentation that Niki, Eeva and Noora told you, and about how we are able to achieve our financial targets. Finally, the third part is that how we are able to finance all these fancy things and growth and investment in the future. Starting from our updated financial targets. Since the IPO, we have kept our financial targets the same. Now, during this year already, we announced our new financial targets for the next strategy period. There's slight updates on those. The growth target is now to have at least 5% growth. You have heard today that the reasoning behind that is it's more related to overall macroeconomic development in Finland. We are taking more steps towards consumer service and business service industry than the traditional healthcare service industry.
The previous growth target was linked how the overall healthcare market has grown historically, and what has been our growth over that. On top of that, there was a small piece of a smaller M&As included in that. Basically, the definition behind that growth target has changed a bit. Secondly, why it's at least 5% is, of course, because it includes the M&A now. Basically, of course, when we will have a larger M&A acquisition, it might be well above that 5%. That's quite obvious. We still kept the profitability target on that 12%-13%, and I'll open the logic why we see that we are able to achieve it, and why we don't see any major risk for the dilution of that margin. For the indebtedness, we made basically only the technical updates.
Up from 3x to 3.5x is pretty much the impact of the IFRS 16 implementation. That's purely, you could say, a technical update on that sense. The dividend payout ratio has also slightly increased up to 40% from 30%. How we have then performed since the IPO. On the left-hand side, you can see the growth numbers. 2019 numbers excludes the Attendo acquisitions, and you can see that the CAGR has been at 9%. Even though that you would include some sort of estimated pro forma, which is, of course, not the official IFRS numbers, but some kind of estimate for the 2017 numbers regarding the missing three months of the Diacor acquisition, you will still end up on having 7%-8% CAGR growth out of that 6%-8% revenue growth target.
On the profitability, you already saw today the trend from 2014 up to 2019. You saw that absolute EBITDA profitability has increased every year. Has actually the relative, the percentage increase up until 2018 when it was at 11.8%. We made the Attendo acquisition, which had that EBITDA profitability of 7.8%. Of course, it had at the time the diluting impact for the total margin. Although the underlying margin still for the remaining Terveystalo developed positively. The absolute EBITDA growth has been at 26%. When it comes to the leverage ratio, we said that it will not exceed three times EBITDA, although it might do so in conjunction with the larger acquisition. That exactly was what happened.
At the end of 2018, the net debt impact of the Attendo acquisition is included in the balance sheet, but the P&L impact is not included. Therefore, you should do that kind of pro forma for that. For the dividend payout ratio, even though that we only paid half of the initially stated dividend during this year, we have still paid that more than 30% of the net profit. At the time of the IPO, we also claimed to be industry leading in margins, and we have kept that. You can see the Nordic peer group companies in here. Even though that we made that lower margin Attendo acquisition, and integrated that up to 2019, we are still the most profitable company within our industry. While growing, while integrating, we have been able to keep our profitability.
That's, like we have said, also our strategic target going forward. Our strategic target is to be the profitability leader in the Nordic region in private healthcare services. How we are then going to achieve that, you have heard today that our plan is to have that smartest platform in the industry. Through that, we are able to grow share by improving conversion, like you heard Nikki explained, by increasing profit per visit, increasing capacity, increasing the supply and the demand, improving the supply and the demand balance, and increasing the number of visits. I will still open the logic of those. Eeva explained to you that our other target is to be customer's health partner. Through that, we are able to grow market and the share of wallet.
Basically targeting new markets, new services, et cetera, et cetera, and higher engagement and loyalty within our customer base. We will also continue to do M&A, and I'll open the logic with that. We have categorized our target entities into 3 categories, which I'll open you shortly. The key enabler from the operational perspective is this operating leverage model that we are having within our operation, which Ville already touched upon earlier. That's why we haven't actually separated that what is the impact of the smartest platform or customer self-partner for the top line or the profitability because of the operating leverage through which it will have an impact on both of those. The logic for that is that you have to show it up so that then it works.
Yeah, exactly. The operating leverage, like Ville told, it's a crucial thing to us, and it's continued to be key driver for the profitability also in the future. On the left-hand side-You can see an illustration that we have still capacity when it comes to the network, and obviously we have capacity when it comes to the digital health services. A while back when I joined the company and soon later that we realized that by doing couple of handful of key acquisitions, we are able to achieve a tipping point, so to speak, so that every acquisition or every growth since that are very synergistic. We were able to build a physical platform, which we are having today, and that's why it's so great model and it's actually quite difficult to copy.
If you think about that nowadays, I think it was back at 2018 when 75% of Finns live within 15 minutes of our clinic. Today it has to be even more, that was 2018 number. Like Eeva told you, we have 1 million online portal users and over 200 people that are using our mobile app. That is the platform from the physical KPI perspective, so to speak, which is quite difficult to copy, I would say. When you have that wide physical network, and when you have centralized all those functions that we have done during the years, the incremental visitor for that physical network comes with very high, nice margins and every visit of that or if you visit any of our healthcare clinics or hospitals, there are very little back office work existing in those places.
Everything is centralized and automized after that, most of that. That is all backed by our central support functions, which are key enablers for that operating leverage. It's not just admin, it's not just bookkeeping, invoicing, marketing, et cetera. It's procurement and it's that building that digital platform continuously, and it's that M&A, which is crucial part of that existence. The same logic actually applies when today we already have discussed about the digital health services. Petri told that we have these pre-booked video appointments. The operational logic with those is exactly the same as with the physical appointment because quite typically, when you go to the time booking engine, you can choose that whether you would like to take a physical meeting or video meeting. What it means in practice nowadays is that the doctor is sitting his or her appointment room.
Basically the pricing is the same, the doctor is sitting at the same places, but he only takes or she only takes the video visits. Many times comes those online video appointments or online chats or those subscription-based services or fixed-fee services. Of course, the operating leverage for those services is even better because those chats and online visits, it's basically irrelevant in which location you're sitting. As a doctor, you can even do your golf courses in Marbella and have a doctor visit from there. Basically you don't need a physical facilities to do those chats. Hopefully there's no one in Marbella taking those, but basic in theory at least you can choose to do so. That's why we believe that it will further enhance the profitability in these sort of growth.
When you take then look at the cost structure for our business, here are the 2019 numbers in which roughly 40% of the expenses are either fixed or so-called semi-fixed expenses. It means that while having the more traffic like we have heard today, those typically scale quite nicely. Of course, when you have a further growth, you need more people to serve. If you have even more growth, you need more facilities or marketing or whatever, admin expenses. That's why key driver for the profitability improvement is still this operating leverage and how the logic works in all these different kind of also future pricing models. Next, when it comes to those M&As, like Ville said, we have done that 200 acquisitions, roughly 100 during my time, since 2012. Like Ville already mentioned, the typical healthcare clinic market is already quite consolidated.
Of course, there's always existing targets. There's a dynamic market, there's new small clinics popping up every year. Basically, there's always room to grow in that sense. What we have done is we have targeted growth through these three different categories of the target entities. We are strengthening our scalable capabilities. Here is one example that those that followed our previous quarterly report presentation, there was Eeva, CEO, presenting there. That's one of the examples. Those are typically IT-related target entities, which we are able to acquire and bolt on to our existing infrastructure, therefore get the scalability through the network and through the digital footprint as well. Obviously, those are typically all internationally scalable and made for international, not typically for the Finnish market to start with.
The second example for that is that even though that was not the acquisition, this week we made a service contract with Yogaia, which is serving an online yoga studio, which is one of the example, which was also mentioned in Eeva's presentation. We are also partnering with those scalable platforms that we are able to scale within our platform. You don't always need to acquire those, you can also partner with those and have still quite attractive earnings models because IT and digital world enables that. You are able to track it. You don't need a pen and paper to follow the money transactions anymore. Like Ville mentioned, we still see growth opportunities in those adjacent categories in many of those that are mentioned here, dental, physio, mental health.
Our market share is still quite low in Finland, less than 20% always, and in many cases, also less than 10% or even less than 5%. There's plenty of room to grow in those segment through acquisitions and through other sort of activities like you have heard today. We see that there is opportunities in certain specialties, growth in new services, and those niche type of specialized medical fields and expanding therefore to the new markets as well. Why we continue to do this, is that we have really excellent track record when it comes to the M&A. Even though since the IPO, we have been able to create quite significant amount of value through those acquisitions, this example includes the five largest acquisition post the IPO.
It includes Diacor, Terveystalo Palvelut, Attendo Healthcare, Porin Lääkäritalo, and two smaller acquisitions done during the last year, Tyske and Työkunto. The pre-synergy multiple of those acquisition has been at 13. The post-synergy has been six. You should know online and you are better expert to our valuation, so you can do the math at how much we have been able to create value through those acquisitions. We have remained to be quite conservative when it comes to those business cases. We have been able to exceed 9% our projected cost synergies in those healthcare acquisitions. That is the reason and why we continue to do so. The key enabler for that is that, like I mentioned back five years ago, we were able to achieve that tipping point in the market, so that basically all acquisitions that we do are synergistic nowadays.
When it comes to the smartest platform in the industry and customers' health partner, Niki went through those examples of these initiatives, like as an example, the tire conversion, if you have 2%-3% processing improvement in there, if you would have more visits by better care compliance, you would have that EUR 13 million-EUR 100 million revenue impact, just by having a few biggest ICD codes and episodes. These are more, so to speak, process improvements in which historically we have been quite good at, and that's why we believe that we are able to also execute these kind of improvements also in the future.
On Eeva's presentation, you saw that, as an example, if you are able to get the new customers with those low barrier to entry or low entry service types, even though that they would spend significantly less than the existing customer, it will of course have a big impact for the total revenue as well as if we are able to increase the share of wallet by having incremental visits within the existing customers. I think the key takeaway on that is that it's not just about everybody can do the math at if the well-being is 10% of the total revenue, roughly speaking, and if that grows 10% or 20%, it contributes 1% or 2% for the total growth. It's not rocket science. What is the rocket science part is that how that builds loyalty and engagement with that individual private customer.
That's the, I think, the much more important thing. Basically, when you have any other healthcare need, which we have already discussed earlier today, you don't have to go to that other operators, healthcare operators or service providers, webpages or online booking system, but you can get that service from our existing facilities, either through digital services or through the physical services. That's the logic with that. Why we believe, I said to you that I will mention that why we believe that we're able to achieve still that 12%-13% margin. The reason and the logic for that is that if you take a look at this, and you have those slides, and if you take a look at those examples through which we are targeting that growth, mostly those are coming within our existing facilities.
In those incremental visits, we are able to gain the benefit from that operating leverage that we are having. Most of these are incremental visitors within the existing facilities, and therefore have high margin and high operating leverage in that sense. That's the brilliance of this model. From the financing perspective, you probably think how to finance all these fancy investments and M&As and growing dividend and everything. The cash flow profile you can see on the left-hand side. Obviously, in this kind of business, the cash flow profile is quite stable. One of the key enablers for that is, like Ville already mentioned earlier, is that we operate in the rental facilities. Basically, nowadays when we renew our rental contracts, we typically do it for the five years or maximum 10 years. That applies to bigger units and bigger hospitals.
For the smaller units, actually, most of those nowadays are valid until further notice, meaning that those have everything between three-12 months notice period. It's a very well-managed portfolio. We now have a team to do that, so that it's a continuous thinking through how to balance the risk and the opportunity and how we are able to adopt the transformation, should that happen soon, so that we are not committed too long to certain rental facilities. Should also mention that up until the COVID-19 situation, revenue within our existing facilities has continuously grown. Basically, we haven't closed any units. There's no need to do that because we don't have any loss-making units. The reason for that is exactly the logic that I explained to you earlier.
When you get a certain scale and you centralize all the functions, there's only customer-serving people with the unit, that's why it's very low costs to have incremental units and incremental network therefore. Actually, the fun fact, if you want to call it that way, that some of our best margin units are located in very remote areas. Basically, what you need in very small village or city, you only need a doctor and a PC. The value of the rental contract is really insignificant. When you have this kind of stable cash flow profile, we are able to, in the future, allocate the capital quite nicely, we believe, between dividends, investments for growth and to execute still M&A.
If you take still one step further on that cash flow, that how it has developed over recent years, from the CapEx perspective, you can see that actually CapEx relative to revenue has remained rather stable all the time since the IPO. It has been more or less 4% of the revenue. What has changed since the IPO, like we said already back at the days, is that investments in those intangible assets, it was four-point-something at the IPO, it was EUR 5 million at the end of 2017. It has been now that EUR 18 million. It has been more than three-folded. We have continuously invested on that digital platform from the cash flow perspective or the balance sheet perspective, the impact you can see here. Of course it will have its costs and a CapEx therefore.
On the other hand, even though that we have increased our physical network quite considerably from 2017 up to that 300 unit, which it is nowadays, the investments in machinery and equipment and improvement to the premises has remained more or less the same level. What has increased is the investment in intangible assets, and rest has remained rather stable. Taking that to the future, I think the historical development is also quite good proxy for the future. Basically, we have continuously repeated that we continue to invest in our digital platform, and everything is planned based on how to serve it in the future digitally. That's why it will continue to have impact for the intangible asset investments as well in the future.
From the balance sheet side, in our latest interim report, our leverage ratio was still below, even though the COVID-19 situation impacted us, was still below that financial target. It was 3.4x EBITDA. As a reminder, at the end of last year, it was 3.1. As a reminder, in a normal situation, we are in a very stable industry. Healthcare service industry is very stable. That's why, as an example, our biggest competitor here in Finland, Mehiläinen, at the end of 2019, their leverage ratio was between seven and eight, depending on the definition. More than double our leverage ratio. Their absolute level of the EBITDA is pretty much the same. It's similar size of our company and the leverage ratio is between seven and eight.
Therefore, I would argue that we have adequate amount of debt capacity if there is possibilities that we would need to do larger move or something. That is not the case, and that is not the problem. If we take a look at the working capital development, I think one of the highlights of this industry is that we have been continuously able to decline the working capital level of our operations. Remember that during that period, we have done two largest acquisitions and integrated those that has ever done in the history of Finnish healthcare. Everybody that has done larger acquisitions and trying to integrate those understands that, like Ville mentioned, there's a lot of hassle and bustle in your back offices when you try to integrate sizeable operations that are operating in many different systems, many different back office systems.
In spite of that, we have been able to continuously improve the margins, continuously improve the EBITDA, and continuously improve our working capital. Of course, it's dozens and even hundreds of small initiatives that you have to do all the time continuously, but when having a good stamina and excellent team, you're able to do it even at the time of sizeable integration. Net-net, conclude my section and before Q&A I think the four key takeaways is that since the IPO, we have more or less delivered our financial targets. We have been able to grow. Remember that the growth is close to 3%, and our growth since the IPO was that, say, 7%-9%, depending on the definition, at least three times faster than the market growth.
That's one of the reasons why we are now saying that our growth target is not committed to addressable healthcare market growth, but it's more steered towards overall economic development and consumer services and business services market as our business, as you have heard today, is developing more towards that. We see further opportunities for growth by having more visits and higher self-wallet through this increased supply that Niki explained to you earlier through the healthcare professionals, through having new services and new markets like Eeva told you earlier today. That is supported by our strong excellence in M&A, and therefore, we believe that they're able to achieve that.
We also believe that there's a strong further improvement potential when it comes to this operating leverage, through those digitalized and personalized services, meaning those new pricing models, meaning that it's both the service provider and the customer can be remote, actually, not within our facilities. We believe that we are able to improve the conversion like Nikki explained to you. We have already projects ongoing on that and while Nikki doing it, I truly believe that we're able to also execute it. We are able to optimize the supply and demand, and like you have seen, we have now invested in pricing intelligence and building those competencies, and therefore, we believe that we are able to be leader on that area as well.
All this is supported by our predictable cash flow, those efficient processes on which we have worked already a decade, I would say. Quite modest CapEx requirements going forward as well. This cash flow obviously supports then our strategy implementation, supported by, enabled also by releasing cash from the working capital continuously. That concludes my section. I think have plenty of time to have a wonderful Q&A.
Yes, we have plenty of time for Q&A. Is there any questions from the room to Ilkka? Panu, go ahead.
Yes. It's Panu Laitinmäki from Danske Bank. I'd like to ask about your view on market growth. You highlight that your growth is not dependent on that you have your own actions to drive that. How do you see underlying market growth for the corporate and private segment for the maybe for the short term, one year and maybe for a three-year period? Maybe just to elaborate my question, if you think that everyone in Finland already has or all the employees have occupational healthcare. I guess that the underlying growth would require that it's higher spend by the employee, by the company, so they need to decide to spend more. How is that proceeding with the COVID-19 impacting companies? Have you seen that the companies would cut spending to save costs?
It's a long question, and I'll try to cover it. Starting from the market, if you take a really long-term view for the market, in Finland, as I think in many other countries, healthcare spend has always grown a bit above the overall GDP growth. I don't actually see, based on any political initiatives or any other sort of scenario, why that would change in the long run. Of course, I think it's quite obvious that during this year, I think it might even be that we are seeing first I've actually saw one headline, which was related to that we are seeing the first decline in the healthcare spend since the independence of Finland. 102 years growth, and now we are having a first year of declining spending in healthcare overall.
After this year, I think you have a valid point on that most of Finland, most of Finnish people are already covered by occupational healthcare agreement and most of Finns are already using some kind of private healthcare services as well. If you take just that traditional healthcare markets, there's still quite a bit actually which is provided by the public party, even though that is not sort of if they compete with the private sector, it's not legally valid, that they have to outsource it. From the technical perspective, there's still outsourcing potential. Other sort of outsourcing potential is that there's still some corporates that are providing services themselves. Both of these has been continuous trend that both the municipalities will continue to outsource their occupational healthcare, and the corporates will outsource their occupational healthcare.
Yes, you're right on that, in a time like this when every company tries to limit their costs, like we have said earlier, the picture with the corporate segment is polarizing. There's corporates that are having big, huge problems that try to cut all the costs in a short term that they are able to do. On the other hand, there's lots of companies that are seeing bottlenecks when it comes to the supply of the trained workforce. For those companies, the incremental services that they are able to provide their employees starts to be more benefit type of thing to employees. It's a really mixed picture in the market at the moment, and that's also the reasoning for our strategic.
In our strategy, like you have seen today, we're not focusing on the growth initiatives for the corporate segment, the growth initiatives for the private and the public segment. That's the reason why it's based on the building up the smartest platform and the healthcare partner, not based on the customers. The growth piece, like Eeva already explained earlier, that especially when it comes to that healthcare partner, the more growth opportunities obviously lies within the private segment and the private customers. Because in that segment, the usage of those is still really low. It's still like Niki explained to you earlier, most of people still behave like 10 years ago. If you are sick, you go to the doctor, you go to the lab, imaging, surgery. That's it. That's where we see a lot of opportunities in the future.
Let me add just one more detail to that. Traditional corporate segment, which you are referring to, or business area, is more prone to larger organization, industrial organization, et cetera. Even within our current pool of corporates, we have room to grow in smaller segment, mid-size and smaller companies. What it requires from us, from our traditional corporate model, is what actually Noora went through at least a little bit, ability to package that make it easy to buy, priced it properly. There we can grow even inside this current market.
Exactly. It has been too difficult to do occupational healthcare contract.
Nowadays, it's much easier.
Did Jutta have a question in between?
Jutta Rahikainen, SEB. A question on the, if I call it current trading, you did provide a July sales already earlier, so that we have. Then listening to you now, it sounds as August has been semi-normal, but correct me if I'm wrong. I'm also interested now when you talk about people again daring to visit the clinics and this type of elements, is the occupational health care also coming back to, if I call it more normal levels, or is it now fair that we should assume that to be depressed for the coming months and maybe throughout the full year?
Yeah, just as a reminder, those that don't remember, we published the July numbers, which showed that the corporate segment was still below last year by 3%, and the private segment was up by 9%. Like we have said since then that if the society remains open like it has been, we are most likely seeing positive development. In that sense, nothing has changed. Ville already gave you a quite good proxy from which you can take a look at how the business develops, is that credit card data, which is a quite nice correlation, actually. That how the Finnish are spending credit card to healthcare purchases. The second is that if you take a look at the temporary laid-off people and unemployed people, all the employed workforce, those are also relevant KPIs for the occupational healthcare.
If you take a look at the employed people, that's roughly, if I recall it correctly, 80,000 below last year's number. If you take a look at the temporarily laid off people, before the COVID-19 situation started, these are Finnish Työeläke and minister, whatever that is in English, work and I don't know, minister, something minister. Before the COVID-19 started, the temporary laid off people level was 20,000 something. It increased up until 170,000. I think that's beginning of May. Now it has declined down to 62,000 or so. It's still not yet normal, but it has quite rapidly declined. What it means in our business, that like we have said, if you take a look at the occupational healthcare business, it starts with the healthcare plan, with the corporate. You have workplace assessments, and then you typically have these health checkups.
That's the preventive piece and that's the legally required piece. Now when there's less people temporarily laid off and people are more in the offices, even though there's still people work remotely, they now take care of their legally required services. When it then comes to the sicknesses, I think the same sort of trend that the overall trend in Finland is that, of course, Petri can also elaborate on that if you wish, of course, if people are not moving and people are not getting sick, there's less acute illnesses in that sense. Any other than those, the life continues quite normally.
Okay, if I may on the credit card data, you now refer to the data published by certain banks who have.
Yes.
Okay. I think not necessarily everyone does have access to that. How does it look for August?
For the August, I think at the beginning of the August, it was well above beginning of this year. It's relative to January. In August it was above the January level. It has gone up. Last couple of week has remained rather stable or even slightly declined. You should also take into account that as an example in our business and when people goes to those, same applies to our competitors and all private clinics. If you go to those drive-in COVID test as an example, you don't pay with credit card, typically. You get invoice to the home. That as an example, service cannot be seen in that data. That a bit misguides. Anyway, in August it has developed positively and remained rather stable.
Okay. August was above.
Above January.
January in this data.
Yeah.
Okay. Cool. Thanks.
Thanks. I think we'll take some questions from the webcast in this point. First question from Alex Gibson, Morgan Stanley. When do you start negotiating 2021 contracts for your corporate business, and what do you expect for pricing and contracted volume growth in light of COVID-19 pressures on the corporates? Net, do you expect growth in the corporate business in 2021 over 2019 levels, or are you expecting to see rebalancing in this segment?
The price list for the corporate clients is sent. Noora is building it, and it will be sent, I think, at the end of October or at the beginning of October. In the October in any way. After that's the annual price list that will be sent to corporate clients. For the corporate segment, it should also be taken into account that in times like these, corporates typically concentrate on something else than retendering occupational healthcare contracts. It's a bit different kind of process this year than typically.
When it comes to the next year numbers, obviously we don't disclose any sort of forecast for the next year development, but as said earlier, we are such a big company already when it comes to the Finnish employed workforce, that in a short term, development of the temporarily laid off people and employed workforce is quite good proxy also for, in a short term, also for our corporate segment development.
Thanks. Next question from Sami Sarkamies, Nordea. How do you think competitive landscape and pricing environment towards both customers and doctors will evolve if we assume that the Pihlajalinna, Mehiläinen acquisition will close?
Do you, Ville, want to comment on that?
Maybe I will refer to my earlier comment regarding Terveystalo's growth. Terveystalo has been able to triple the market growth, and big part of the reasoning behind that one is market consolidation. Market consolidation has been a positive thing for Terveystalo. Of course, Terveystalo has been active part of the consolidation. There are many things that point to the same direction, especially when we come to this more digital and hybrid age. Bigger players will get more than their fair share because we are the only ones who can really invest and innovate and develop. We feel that we are leading that pack. Again, our sense is that consolidation still in Finnish marketplace is rational. This is small-ish market, and consolidation in the history has been a positive thing for Terveystalo.
Thanks. Another question from Nordea, this time from Pauli Lohi. Your profitability has improved gradually over the years and almost reached the EBITDA margin of 12% in 2018. Why didn't we set the profitability target higher for the future, taking into account the existing potential in operating leverage and the other operational excellence initiatives that we outlined today?
Of course, last year how we saw it slightly declined because of the diluting impact of the Attendo acquisition, and obviously this year you don't have to be a analyst to sort of understand that probably this year, it would be hard to achieve that kind of target and therefore we sort of would like to be a bit, I would say, conservative with that target so that we are able to achieve and also try to exceed expectations and our financial targets in the future. Just to not overpromise anything.
Maybe it's good to remember that we are balancing between basically three things here. We are balancing between growth, profitability, and then what we have been discussing a lot today is building scalable platform for the future and that's very important going forward because then that opens up new opportunities in the coming years.
Thanks. Do we have any other questions from the room? Yes, Iiris, please go ahead.
Yeah, Iiris Theman, Carnegie. In terms of acquisitions, how do you see currently the outlook for smaller and larger deals?
Larger deals obviously are always quite sporadic, so you can't sort of forecast those, so it's a smallish market like Ville said, so basically everybody knows everybody and there's a sort of, I would say, almost continuous debate on any sign of sizable maneuvers. When it comes to smaller acquisitions, of course, the COVID-19 situation freezed most of the transactions during the spring. Now we are seeing more activity when it comes to those smaller entities. There's some small entities that are having liquidity problem, and therefore it might be a trigger for them to sell the company. On the other hand, some of those processes which were postponed because of the COVID-19 situation have now sort of restarted post summer.
We see actually it's a quite active market, but it's actually quite interesting to see how the valuations will move now sort of after the COVID acute situation in the future. That still remains to be seen because there's quite little M&A so far executed after the summer and summer break. It's interesting to see. Lots of activities, but you need to have a buyer and a seller.
Outside Finland, can you comment anything about your target markets as you aim to be profitability leader in the Nordic countries? Is kind of, for example, Sweden a natural step for you to expand?
At least in my books, nothing has basically changed. Like we have said already earlier, we have already many years followed our neighboring markets and development in there and have been following transactions in neighboring markets closely and obviously we continue to do so. Like Ville mentioned, it of course has to be value-adding and attractive target.
Yeah. Looking at our agenda when it comes to M&A and then building this scalable platform going forward, as Ilkka mentioned, of course, we are very well aware of what's happening outside Finland as well. It needs to be stated that we are not in any hurry. We don't rush, we don't push any sort of transactional stream outside Finland. We are building a scalable platform which is mostly independent of the system and if a opportunity which is value creating from shareholder value point of view outside Finland, of course, we are interested.
Just to add on that, like mentioned already earlier today, it's good to note and remember always that in a digital world, the national borders are very much lower compared to physical world. I just learned a few days back that, actually, out of those remote visits that we showed you today in Petri’s presentation, et cetera, there's several percentage of those that are coming from outside Finland, actually. People are moving. Of course, we serve only in Finnish nowadays, those have to be Finnish clients. Anyway, it tells a story that in a digital world, there's no national borders.
Thanks. I think that's a good bridge to closing words by Ville then.
All right. Thank you, Ilkka, and thank you for Terveystalo team. I think I said in the beginning that I am very proud to be here today, and of course, even prouder after listening to team's presentations. I think that it was a good demonstration of the brainpower, ideas, innovation capabilities that we do have inside the tent. Also of the fact that we are not only putting fancy headlines to fancy topics. We do have plans. We do have concrete initiatives. We do have projects already ongoing, and we have started to deliver. Today, it has been a lot talk about things like platform, digital capabilities, apps, engine room, processes, connectivity, et cetera. In a way, technology-driven issues, a little bit engineer type of things. As Eeva mentioned, we are conquering this world.
We need to bear in mind that this is still now and in the future people-to-people business. We do have a great track record. We do have financial capability to deliver and take basically any initiative in the agenda. We have great agenda, we have great plans, and we have a very strong team committed to deliver. We have updated our strategy. There, which is not mentioned today, is actually the values that we updated also. Maybe it's worth visiting those as well. There, we are not talking about technology as the primary driver for this Terveystalo. I have now, as I said, been with Terveystalo since December. I found a company which is very unique combination of value-driven people and target-driven people.
We wanted to state that very clearly in our values so that even in the future, although we are building a scalable platform which contains lot of technology, new processes, human being is going to be in the center. We need to understand in all of our touchpoints, this is a very sensitive business that we are dealing with. Even though we are expanding our portfolio, we will be steered by medical science always. Science, hard data will be the guideline. Even though there would be business opportunities outside this sphere, we will not go there. Expanded portfolio does not mean that we would step aside of this box, basically. We are for common good.
Even though, and especially because of, we are driving for industry-leading margins and high growth, that's just a demonstration of the fact that we are able to create value for our customers, be it corporate, be it private or be it public customers. As said, we have a very solid plan for future coming years. In Finnish terms, the team has skis pointing the same direction. We have started to deliver, and team is in place, and it's highly competent. The headlines for our strategy implementation, as you have heard many times, are Smartest Platform and Health Partner. I truly believe in these areas and these improvements. This industry is about to go through biggest transformation in its history. There's huge potential in industrializing and commercializing this one properly, keeping in mind our value base.
I think it's good to have a mood piece here in between, so maybe if you may, let's look at some videos or one video.
I think you probably need to click so that we see the video here as well.
All right.
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I think that video captures the essence of our value base, which I shortly discussed earlier. We will not repeat it anyways. Final slide and final conclusion. As I said in the beginning, this is not a COVID-19 seminar, this was the starting point for today. Important achievement for the organization. I want to use this opportunity as well to thank Terveystalo people for tackling first two phases of COVID-19 crisis in world-class manner. We have basically passed two of these. Getting to this webcast. Our case partly repeated in the phrases and concepts that we have been using throughout the day.
Even though COVID-19 is hitting this industry, has been hitting and continues to hit this industry to a certain extent, the underlying growth drivers for healthcare as an industry in general are really strong, especially when we are expanding the concept of healthcare to healthcare and wellbeing. Terveystalo is an industry-leading provider in this market, Finland and Nordics. Very important, which is one manifestation of our value base as well, is that we are a preferred place to work for healthcare professionals. We have been that for seven consecutive years, and even though Niki is able to optimize the engine room and availability, we will still compete in the labor market for the top-notch professionals and best talent. That's one thing that gives us a competitive edge also in the future.
We have been talking about the platform model, and for me as the new CEO, understanding this business and understanding this company, this has come as sort of a nice surprise that actually these people have invented an asset-light platform model, which can then be further perfected using digital tools, better processes, and benchmarking other industries when it comes to commercial models. As said many times today, we have further growth and profit potential based on our strategy, which we have given you a lot of details today, and I am sure it has been interesting, it has been trustworthy. We can dig even deeper into any of the initiatives that we have discussed today. As I said before, we have a solid, great plan, and we have a team to deliver. These are now the final words from Terveystalo. Thank you. Get better.