Medicare-Grid: New Trends on the Development of E-Health System Based on Grid Technology

The evolution of information technology over the last decade has brought opportunities to improvements in the state of art of medical services. One scenario is that a patient's digital health record can easily be shared among hospitals and medical centers via intemet, enabling the examination performed in one location while clinical diagnosis be done by physicians in another. In this paper, we propose a Medicare-Grid - a novel grid-based E-health system proposed to ease the process of retrieving and exchanging personal health data among hospitals and medical centers. Grid and peer-to-peer technologies have been used to integrate computing and storage resources provided by hospitals, as also to develop an Electronic Health Record (EHR) center to store and share EHRs among these locations. We have also developed a system prototype using ultimate hardware resources and open source software systems to simulate a real scenario as described above. We demonstrate that the idea proposed in the project is feasible, possible to be implemented and applicable to real world.