The Healthcare Institution of South Iceland
The Future is at Home
14th January 2026
Icepharma Welfare hosted the conference The Future Is at Home – Key Steps for Icelandic Healthcare yesterday, focusing on how to empower individuals in their own healthcare journey and on the implementation of new solutions in Icelandic healthcare through welfare technology and new models of service delivery.
At the conference, special emphasis was placed on telehealth services. A guest speaker from Sweden presented experience from a service that has been in use there for several years and explained how it is utilized across municipalities to improve both the quality and accessibility of healthcare. This approach closely reflects the work being done through Heimaspítalinn (The Home Hospital), an innovative pilot project at HSU.
Baldvina Ýr Hafsteinsdóttir, Director of Nursing at HSU, attended the conference on behalf of the organization and expressed great pride in the journey HSU has undertaken in this field.
Welfare technology solutions featured prominently throughout the conference, with strong emphasis on their role not only in increasing efficiency but, more importantly, in improving quality of care. Discussions also highlighted the importance of change management, noting that critical steps in the change process are often overlooked—particularly the need to ensure that staff feel ownership of the changes, understand their purpose, and are engaged and motivated by them.
This is also highly relevant to the Home Hospital project, where both the idea and its implementation were led by Guðný Stella Guðnadóttir, a geriatrician who brought the concept with her upon returning to Iceland. Together with dedicated staff at HSU, she has continued to develop, implement, and follow up on the project.
Finally, an engaging discussion addressed the importance of healthcare institutions being health-literate—not only individuals. To that extent, institutions must understand what patients are experiencing and how best to communicate information in a clear and meaningful way, Baldvina Ýr noted.