What is HealthGrid

Adoption of cutting edge technologies in order to facilitate various healthcare operations and tasks is significant. There is a need for health information systems to be fully integrated with each other and provide interoperability across various organizational domains for ubiquitous access and sharing. The emerging technology of HealthGrids holds the promise to successfully integrate health information systems and various healthcare entities onto a common, globally shared and easily accessible platform. This chapter presents a systematic taxonomy of different types of HealthGrid resources, where the specialized resources can be categorised into three major types; namely, Data or Information or Files (DIF); Applications & Peripherals (AP); and Services. Resource discovery in HealthGrids is an emerging challenge comprising many technical issues encapsulating performance, consistency, compatibility, heterogeneity, integrity, aggregation and security of life-critical data. To address these challenges, a systematic search strategy could be devised and adopted, as the discovered resource should be valid, refined and relevant to the query. Standards could be implemented on domain-specific metadata. This chapter proposes potential solutions for the discovery of different types of HealthGrid resources and reflects on discovering and integrating data resources.