Healthgrids: Review, Challenges And Open Issues

Grid technology has received wide acceptance in fields ranging from industry to academia. Its capability to integrate heterogeneous and distributed computing resources to provide transparent access has been leveraged in different areas of computing needs including healthcare provisioning. The global effort focuses on exploiting the grid infrastructure opportunities in the enhancement of health related activities. This paper reviewed few of the existing healthgrids in the context of applying existing grid infrastructures and middleware in providing specific medical services. The focus is on the services provided using grid services and infrastructures, the middleware forming the bases of interoperability between the services as well as service client specific applications. The contributions of this paper are to highlight and identify open problems, challenges within the healthgrid that can impede the goal of pervasiveness healthcare provisioning