An Experiment to Analyze Performance of Virtual Private Network Approach to Information Exchange between Health Facilities

Abstract

In developing countries, Tanzania in particular, studies and reports have depicted that there is a strong desire and need for seamless information exchange across health care providing facilities.  A limited study conducted in few public and private hospitals has also revealed the same. On the other hand, the eHealth community has failed to effectively take advantage of the advances in technologies to make that desire come true. One potential technology is Virtual Private Network (VPN) for which it has been noticed that there is a misconception and lack of innovative initiatives that slow down its uptake in eHealth. This article presents a technical assessment of the VPN technology in Tanzanian context. Primarily, the assessment focused on practicability of the best VPN practices and the perceived user experience performance when VPN is in use. It was observed that the response time dropped significantly as expected. The increase in response time and computer memory utilization is due to security mechanisms that are involved in VPN, the stronger security is used the more performance decreases. However, the increase in response time and computer memory utilization is very small in such a way that users will not be able to notice.