Seminar Abstract

“The Grid as Infrastructure for Sharing Health Information”

Increasingly, translational research and clinical practice is impeded by the ability to exchange diverse health related information between collaborating parties. The issue of data sharing in a health context is complicated by issues of privacy, heterogeneity of the underlying data types, diverse semantic models, and the fundamentally complex nature of the health-care ecosystem. In this talk, I will discuss the ramifications of the underlying systems complexity of the health care system and how Grids and the associated concept of virtual organizations can provide solutions to the problems that result from this complexity. I will illustrate how Grid infrastructure can be applied within a number of clinical and research applications, including as part of the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), a national scale medical information sharing infrastructure supported by the NIH.