Visions of Health Care Information Systems in Finland by the year 2007 - at the Point of Intersection between Different Cultures

Health care information systems are an area between two intersecting fields: Information Systems and health care. The development of health care information systems (HCIS) is influenced by software and hardware as well as medical innovations/development. The HCISs in also intersects with a wide range of other areas including management science, statistics and biomedical science. The technological development in health care is connected to the overall social development. The overall trend is quite similar in to the whole Western world, but individual countries show differences due to different cultures regarding, eg, the strictness of regulations on data security. In the future, the increasing number of aged people and the resulting increase in demand for health care services will cause a financial crisis in health care. Some (health care) professionals see IT applications as an answer to this crisis, although this assumption is not valid in all systems. The purpose of this article is to offer for researchers and practitioners viewpoints on how to foresee the development of health care information systems and give some guidelines for the future of this rapidly expanding, multidisciplinary, cross-cultural area.