North Karelia in eastern Finland is a region of lakes, majestic rivers and forests. It is deeply rural, where municipal home care services play a central role in caring for older people.
As a child growing up there, I spent a great deal of time with my grandmother. Like many older people, she wanted to remain in her own home for as long as possible. She valued her independence and took pride in managing her daily life on her own terms. Yet I also saw how fragile that independence could become when something as simple as taking medication became stressful and difficult.
It was not a lack of medical treatment that threatened her ability to live at home, but the challenge of managing that treatment consistently – taking the right dosage at the right time, remembering whether it had already been taken, and avoiding missed doses. To support her, municipal homecare services started regular visits to refill the pills to a doset box. I felt that the caregivers were always super busy and sometimes even ignored my grandmother when concentrating medication administration tasks. That experience stayed with me.
Years later, while studying productization, I began exploring how technology could help people like my grandmother live safely and independently for longer and how the valuable time of caregivers could be spent in a more meaningful way. What started as a student project in 2007 eventually became Evondos. The idea was never to replace care with technology, but to strengthen care by giving people the support they need to remain independent. 
Nearly twenty years later, that challenge has only become more pressing. Across Europe, health and care systems are grappling with the same question: how to support older people and those living with long-term conditions amid workforce shortages, rising demand, and constrained resources.
In the UK, the NHS 10-Year Health Plan sets out an ambitious response built around three shifts: from hospital to community, from treatment to prevention, and from analogue to digital care.
These ambitions are welcome and necessary. Yet there is a risk that discussions about transformation focus on the destination without paying enough attention to the practical foundations required achieve them. If more care is to take place at home, a simple question follows: what enables people to live safely and independently there in the first place? One answer is medication.
Every day, millions rely on medicines to manage long-term conditions and maintain their quality of life. Yet medication management is still often treated as an administrative task rather than core care infrastructure.
For decades, health systems have invested heavily in medicines themselves while paying less attention to whether those medicines are taken correctly.
The consequences are significant. Missed doses, incorrect timing and poor adherence can lead to deteriorating health, avoidable hospital admissions and increased pressure on already stretched services.
Research suggests around 4% of hospital admissions are associated with medication non-adherence, with estimates ranging from under 1% to over 10% across systems. Most of these admissions are preventable, highlighting a clear opportunity to improve medication management in community care.
This gap matters. In Nordic health systems, medication management is seen as part of the infrastructure of independent living rather than an operational afterthought. It enables people to stay well, remain at home and retain control over daily life. This perspective has shaped Evondos over the past two decades.
Evondos provides an automated medication dispensing service that supports people to take the right medication at the right time in their own homes, while allowing care teams to monitor use and intervene when needed. Today, our service supports the delivery of more than 100 million medication doses across Northern Europe, and we have helped save over two million working days for care professionals while maintaining medication adherence rates of 99 per cent.
These numbers matter not for what they say about technology, but for what they represent: older people remaining safely in their own homes, families experiencing less anxiety, and care professionals spending more time on meaningful human interaction rather than routine medication visits. Most importantly, they show that digital tools can strengthen care rather than replace it.
This is why medication management deserves a more central place in conversations about the future of community care.
The NHS vision of shifting care closer to home will not be delivered through policy alone. It requires practical systems that support people every day. The shift from analogue to digital is not simply about introducing new technology, but about building reliable infrastructure that makes independent living possible at scale.
That is already beginning to happen. Since entering the UK market, Evondos has been working with organisations including Kyndi, a Local Authority Trading Company owned by Medway Unitary Council, supporting people to manage medication more safely and consistently at home. Early results mirror those seen elsewhere in Europe: improved consistency of medication use, greater confidence for individuals and families, and more efficient use of care resources.
The opportunity now is to think bigger. As Integrated Care Boards, local authorities, NHS organisations, care providers and technology partners work to deliver the ambitions set out in the 10-Year Health Plan, there is an opportunity to reframe medication management as part of the core infrastructure of community-based care.
Because the future of healthcare is not simply digital. It is personal, preventative, and delivered closer to home. And if more people are to live independently for longer, the systems that support them must be as reliable as the medicines they depend on.
By Mika Apell, Director and Founder, Evondos
