Objectives and mission

Efficient, effective and reliable remote healthcare diagnosis, treatment and monitoring represent a holy grail in medicine but solutions have so far proved elusive.

Deployment of Information Technologies (IT) in many sectors has delivered major transformational change. This should hold true in delivering potential to improve healthcare significantly in terms of providing the tools for the world-wide uptake of telemedicine thus delivering radical improvements in service productivity, access to health services, improved quality of care and acceptable levels of patient safety. However, according to the results of the recent largest every survey on European hospitals by the Health Information Network Europe, this potential is currently not being realized by the majority of European Hospitals. Grid technology could serve to breakdown many of the existing barriers to the uptake of telemedicine in the world (integration in healthcare delivery, costs, application complexity, etc.). The overall objective of this present publication centres on the presentation of a unified, effective and resilient telemedicine system through the usage of a Virtual Organizational approach implemented via Grid technology.

The scientific objective of this publication focuses on presentation of research projects into Grid technologies. In essence Grid is “An infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources”. Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed “autonomous” resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users’ quality-of-service requirements. Grids aim at exploiting synergies that result from cooperation and the ability to share and aggregate distributed computational capabilities and deliver them as service. Two classes of Grids will be described: Data/Information/Knowledge Grids and Collaborative Grids. Special focus will be made on networks of Virtual Organizations and the areas of ePharmacology, eImaging, eClinic and eLearning.

The publication aims to present a secure infrastructure for advanced collaborative environments, using multi-site videoconferencing, real-time delivery of microscope imagery and communication and archiving of radiological images to support multi-disciplinary meetings for the review of illness diagnoses and treatment. The publication also hopes to demonstrate the feasibility of remote access to computational medical simulations and the data-mining of patient record databases for improved clinical decision making.

The overall and operational objectives of the publication are as follows:
· To present the potential of using Clusters and Virtual Organization (VO) in the Grid technologies, systems and services area for healthcare purposes.
· To present an operative model of Cluster cooperation in the specified technological field of eHealth .
· To describe integrated voice, video and data system technology and its implementation in eClinic (telediagnosis, teleconsulting, teleradiology, telepathology), eLearning (teleinstruction and teleeducation), eImaging (videoconferencing to support multidisciplinary team meetings and diagnosis across distances by improved imaging technology), ePharmacology (health management – remote databases access; remote databases managements; medical statistical surveys; general hygienic education; disaster mitigation; better remote, integrated, medical management; Virtual Epidemiology).

In terms of the wider objectives of this publication, it envisages the description and presentation of Grid technologies which enable: implementation of clinical information system, secure remote patient diagnosis, treatment, follow up and monitoring; distance education.

The mission of the publication is to present the perspectives and possibilities of application of Grid technologies for eHealth purposes and promotion of new projects and research activities in this field.