Grids for Public Health - Guest Posting from the HealthGrid team

It's coming to the end of the second day of HealthGrid 2009 and Samuel Keuchkerian, Executive Director at HealthGrid is on hand to blog from the last session of the day:

Ken Hall, for The Center for Diseases Control (CDC), as the first panelist for the session Global Public Health Grid, gave a talk about the actions that CDC do to increase dissemination about the need of the grid technologies in public health, explaining that the needs of the grid for disease control and public health issues is tremendous for several reasons.

One of the reasons is that the distributed data coming from the 70 000 data silos in the US would require a tremendous amount of data storage and speed for transmitting and accessing the information available.

Grid technologies were described as making the data mining into already existing local repositories easier as they would avoid having to establish massive repositories for patients and medical data. This should also make the sourcing of data for research and for public health information easier, as it responds to the legal aspects of the transfer of data outside the medical facilities which is a very strict legal issue in many states.

CDC is therefore starting initiatives that will use the grids to reinforce public health data management, thus allowing lower cost solutions to some of the major healthcare problems: data analysis, disease control and epidemic mapping.

- Samuel Keuchkerian