A European Project
The HealthGrid initiative published in 2004 its "White Paper". The conclusion of this document developed the aspects of HealthGrid technologies and user status and this finally initiated a new project proposal, in other words, SHARE. Its main goal is intended to ensure the successful take-up of HealthGrid within the next 10 years by creating a roadmap for essential technology development in the coming years.
SHARE is a European initiative defending the Grid concepts and the introduction of new technologies in the medical sector, involving e-health or e-infrastructures into medical research. These new tool concepts in medical research open a very new perspective and their integration in future years appears like a great challenge for the evolvement of new technologies in research area.
Some important aspects have also to be well integrated and managed in terms of Grids' use because Grids are involving data processing and data manipulation. As soon as personal data are put on Grids, they can be available to any healthcare professional and this is the reason why special issues and status regarding ethical and legal aspects have strongly been developed although these data are at the base of all Grids.
Indeed data are needed for research, medicine evolution, science and technology, analysis, and overall for the massive share of quantities of diverse geographically distributed information or computationally intensive analysis techniques. That is why getting the access to different sources of medical data is a key requirement for providing equitable and efficient healthcare of the highest quality. This service is usually geographically distributed, and the knowledge from these data is extracted from the availability of computer-based tools.
In an other perspective, it is also important today to operate actions at the European Union level in order to promote Grids for health, to address citizen mobility and to provide cross frontier interoperability of data as well as cross-frontier infrastructures. Moreover, this promotion would let optimal exploitation of resources in technical as well as in medical sectors, an equitable distribution of healthcare and a definition or implementation of standards.
Such deployment requires harmonisation of existing legal frameworks for storing, accessing, communicating, and processing health related data between European countries. In this objective, a definite schedule has already been fixed at the beginning of the project between all the teams or workpackages. These different parties participating to the project have been reporting deliverables which demonstrate the improvements and the development of the healthgrid concept. Scheduled meetings give also the opportunities for the parties to communicate directly and to solve problems with rapidity and efficiency.
