What is Biostatistics

Epidemiology constitutes one relevant use case for the adoption of grids for health. It combines challenges that have been traditionally addressed by grid technologies, such as managing large amounts of distributed and heterogeneous data, large scale computing and the need for integration and collaboration tools, but introduces new challenges traditionally addressed from the e-health area. The application of grid technologies to epidemiology has been concentrated in the federation of distributed repositories of data, the evaluation of computationally intensive statistical epidemiological models and the management of authorisation mechanism in virtual organisations. However, epidemiology presents important additional constraints that are not solved and harness the take-off of grid technologies. The most important problems are on the semantic integration of data, the effective management of security and privacy, the lack of exploitation models for the use of infrastructures, the instability of Quality of Service and the seamless integration of the technology on the epidemiology environment. This chapter presents an analysis of how these issues are being considered in state-of-the-art research.