A roadmap toward a European healthgrid

This is an exciting work towards building an environment of sharing of resources across heterogeneous and dispersed health data:

• molecular data (e.g. genomics, proteomics)
• cellular data (e.g. pathways)
• tissue data (e.g. cancer types, wound healing)
• personal data (e.g. PHR, EHR)
• population data (e.g. epidemiology)

Also, an application which can be accessed by all users as a tailored information system according to their level of authorization and without loss of information. Collaboration is the heart of this especially across multiple disciplines. In addition, many standards have not yet been realized (e.g., HL7 (Health Level Seven), the US based Standards Development Organization that currently offers asynchronous messaging), this makes a grid approach far more powerful where organizations join the grid and make their information available for querying, processing, analysis, etc.

Few challenges remain, such as:

• How do we secure and maintain high performance of such distributed structure of data integration and computing?
• How do we close the gap between grid standards and health-related standards [some nice work's been done here by Power, et al]?
• How do we go about next-generation open source ontologies for medical informatics?
• How do we close the gap between hospital policies, public health policies, etc. and the grid approach?
• How do we go about consumerism and patient ownership of her or his data?

If anything, I hope this raises more awareness of the grid application in health and public health - much still remains to be answered.

Successes are already underway in the health community, for example:

• in the European health community (HealthGrid©)
• US CDC [presentation on the Public Health Grid by Ken Hall (BearingPoint, Inc) and Dr. Tom Savel (US CDC) at the recent HimSS February 2008 meeting]

But also there are lots of lessons which we can learn from the innovative thinking of efforts like the Google Cloud (click here to learn more about cloud computing). In addition, InSTEDD’s Mesh4x allows for asynchronous integration of data between many different sources regardless of network connection, systems or services. Network connectivity is not a constant requirement, as Mesh4x can collect and distribute updates between two users over SMS, Internet (HTTP exchange), or through other available means. InSTEDD recently partnered with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and developed a synchronization adapter for Epi Info™, CDC's application for field collection of disease outbreak information (you can read more about this project in 2 of my previous blogs: Empowering Epidemiologists to Share Information, Anytime, Anywhere: Epi Info™ and Mesh4x, and our final demonstration in December 2008: Epi Info™ and Mesh4x Prototype Demonstration with US CDC).


I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this...

Related Links:

• US CDC Recommends Mesh4x to Synchronize Data using Epi Info™
  
• CDC/InSTEDD Collaboration blog
• Empowering Epidemiologists to Share Information, Anytime, Anywhere: Epi Info™ and Mesh4x
• Epi Info™ current website on CDC.gov (available for download Epi Info™ 3.5.1 (last accessed May 16th, 2009))
• Epi Info™ User Forum
  
• Epi Info™ Community Edition (CE)
  
• Epi Info™ Friends Group on Google (Restricted to invited members. To become a member, contact the group owner at andy.dean@gmail.com)
• Epi Info™ in Italy
  
• Epi Info™ in Brazil (Portuguese)
  
• Epi Info™ in Spain
  
• InSTEDD Mesh4X
  
• InSTEDD Mesh4x Discussion Group
• Juan Marcelo Tondato's Blog on Mesh4x
• Eduardo Jezierski's Blog on Mesh4x
• Taha Kass-Hout's Blog on Mesh4x
• Daniel Cazzulino's Blog on Mesh Architecture
  
• Pablo M. Cibraro's Blog on Mesh Architecture
• Public Health Grid (PHGrid) - Research & Development

Medicine 2.0™ Congress: Social Networking and Web 2.0 Applications in Medicine and Health

I am speaking at the Medicine 2.0™ conference on adapting and adopting social networking methods for biosurveillance. The conference is taking place in Ontario, CA on Sept4-5, 2008. "Medicine 2.0™ is an international conference on Web 2.0 applications in health and medicine, organized and co-sponsored by the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the International Medical Informatics Association, the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, CHIRAD, and a number of other sponsoring organizations." The congress was organized by Dr. Gunther Eysenbach.

Here is a list of the final accepted abstracts and the Medicine 2.0™ Blog site...

I am very interested in hearing your thoughts and any input you can provide to help me better present the topic. Definitely if you know of existing or related work that I can reference will be much appreciated...

And as my friend Susanne Jul would say: Gunalchéesh [thank you, Tlingit]