A HealthGrid 2010 Guest Post

The following guest post comes from HealthGrid's Executive Director Samuel Keuchkerian on Joan Dzenowagis' keynote talk at HealthGrid2010 this morning:

A clear message was addressed, regarding the need for the healthgrid community to be more global in their dissemination efforts to raise awareness of the benefits, and reach other communities needing these type of applications. In short, keeping powerful applications confidential will not help policy makers and ministries of health further increase their funding.

An important point is therefore for scientists using grids for health applications to increase their link with key actors in e-health and HIS (health information systems). Moving forward together, including the corporate world, so that the science and public health agenda meets the short term vision of the deciders at government levels will provide grounds for stronger research for the HealthGrid community.

The WHO and EC global vision on the need for the use of healthgrids in healthcare has been increasingly improving the understanding of the politics, paving the way for further national and transnational funding for health information systems and healthgrid applications.

HealthGrid being the link for the Life Science community will further assist scientists to reach the key stakeholders. It certainly is the right timing as notions of healthgrids have now passed the barriers of public domain and are understood as the key supporting technologies for achieving primary healthcare and public health political targets.