The recent emergence of Grid technology opens new perspectives to enable interdisciplinary research and technology development at the cross roads of medical informatics, bioinformatics and system biology impacting healthcare. The HealthGrid roadmap, to be developed by the SHARE project, will provide a comprehensive coverage of the RTD domain and the uptake of Grid applications in healthcare, including inter alia infrastructure, security, ethical, legal, financial and economic issues.

The roadmap will focus on identifying requirements for further research and technology development. It will also sketch a realistic picture with respect to desirable applications/ICT implementations and indicate which technologies may have the potential to make a substantial contribution in this context. This will be supported through the presentation of good practice examples.

Each section of the roadmap will detail actions to be taken in terms of objectives and possible methods or approach as well as recommended milestones for completion, stakeholders responsible, appropriate methods of coordination etc. All relevant stakeholders will be involved in a bottom up approach so as to ensure the relevancy and positive impact of the roadmap. Care will also be taken to include issues related to standards and security requirements for handling medical data. Non-European issues will be also factor in to our roadmap in order to ensure international interoperability.

empirica is involved in SHARE as a subcontractor.