Elina Hemminki

Kirsti Elina Hemminki (born 22 August 1948) is a Finnish academic who was trained in medicine and public health. She has wide research experience in health services and epidemiological research. Her research interests include use, determinants and consequences of medical technology, particularly in the field of preventive services. Many of her examples come from women's and children's health and drugs (medicines). Her interests include health services trials, and how ethical and governance rules apply to them. Her other research interests have included research policy and research regulation.

Education Hemminki graduated from a high school in Hyvinkää, Finland in 1967. She received her medical degree from the University of Helsinki (Licentiate of Medicine, MD) in 1973, and her DrPH, from the University of Tampere. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Services Administration, School of Public Health, the Johns Hopkins University, from 1976 to 1978.

Career Hemminki started her research work while still a medical student. Her plans to combine research and clinical practice were ruined after realizing that combining these two with raising children was too much. Thus, since her graduation she has worked as a researcher and teacher in universities and research institutes, mainly in Finland. Her latest positions are a research professor in THL National Institute of Health and Welfare,

Besides systematic reviews, Hemminki's other tools to critically examine the use of health technology were area variation as well as comparing the scientific evidence with the actual practice. She has also had a great interest to adapt the methods of randomized trials to evaluate health services (health services trials). Other methodological interests Elina Hemminki has had include use of administrative health registers in research.

Many of Hemminki's research focused on reproduction, first pregnancy and birth, and later more broadly, menopause. The interest in menopause started in a research visit to John and Sonja McKinley's research unit in Boston in 1987, later known as the New England Research Institutes, which at the time had interest in menopause. That was the time of a hot debate of the benefits of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), mainly based on non-experimental data. The subsequent study in Finland on the menopause as a health service question, widened into involvement into study and debate on health effects of HRT. That interest produced a number of important publications, including the selection bias to HRT and the use of non-public documents of drug control authorities to study adverse effects of drugs. The interest led also to a small trial in Estonia, originally planned to be part of a large WISDOM study.

The work with HRT health effects concretely showed what it was like to have a varying view with local establishment, as well as the needs and working habits of media. This experience activated Hemminki's old interest in commercial factors influencing physicians and conflict of interests (COI). In her 1977 paper in Social Science & Medicine, Hemminki had empirically showed that many Finnish key-physicians had associations with drug industry. The potential consequences of such close collaboration include merging of the interest of commercial actors, particularly drug industry, and medical establishment, and confusing the voice of the scientific world. This is likely to have adverse effects on medical practice and health policy.

The large role of the commercial actors in funding health research, hinders on evidence-based medicine, as well as the dominance of drug research and its paradigms in regulation of medical research contributed to Hemminki's interest to study medical research and its regulation. and Finnish NGO Physicians for Social Responsibility.