What are Healthgrids ?

Healthgrids are Grid infrastructures comprising applications, services or middleware components that deal with the specific problems arising in the processing of biomedical data. Resources in Healthgrids are databases, computing power, medical expertise and even medical devices. Healthgrid are then closely related to e-health.

They can be seen here as environments where data of medical interest can be stored, processed and made easily available to the different healthcare participants. The Grid is a "work in progress" as it has today always been developing by hundreds of researchers and software engineers around the world.

The HealthGrid space represents today some of the most interesting drivers for progress in knowledge-based ubiquitous and transparent computing.

• Here are following the key features of HealthGrids:
• Healthgrids are more closely related to data, but many hospitals are reluctant to let the information flow outside the hospital bounds.
• Management of Distributed Databases and Data Mining capabilities are important tools for many biomedical applications.
• Security in Grid infrastructures is sufficient for research, but it must be improved in the future to ensure privacy of data.
• Robustness and Fault Tolerance of Grids fits very well to the needs for "always on" medical applications.
• Research communities in biocomputing or biomodelling and simulation have a strong need for resources that can be provided through the Grid.
• Flexibility is needed for the control of VOs at a large level.