Architectural Choices for mHealth Services in Finland and Cameroon

In the developed world health care sector has used for tens of years information systems in their daily activities. Soon after the Internet usage began to spread to the societies mid 1990'ies the sector began to ponder how to offer services over the web to patients. The USA and the EU began to discuss eHealth scenarios, and many services are now offered, including appointments to doctors and nurses, virtual doctors, and electronic prescriptions. Electronic patient records are widely utilized could also be retrieved by patients and other health care personnel, but due to technical, organizational and legal restrictions this is not yet reality. Mobile networks and high-end mobile terminals are as powerful as laptops were a few years ago and could be used to access and store pertinent health information. In this article we discuss architectural choices that would facilitate the usage of the collected personal health care information, and their pros and cons. We mainly base our findings on the situation in Finland. We contrast, though, the findings with the situation in Cameroon, where the ICT infrastructure is weak and the ICT infrastructure in the health care could more strongly rely on mobile networks and emerging smart terminals.