Towards secure Grid-enabled healthcare

The primary focus of the UK e-Science Programme is the development of software architectures, middleware and applications to support the end-user scientific community in the undertaking of large-scale research. A significant subset of e-Science projects is concerned with the healthcare domain: as well as satisfying the needs of the end users, such projects have to consider the legal, ethical and security constraints associated with the use of sensitive patient data-these concerns are particularly relevant within the context of the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS). In this paper we present a vision for Grid-enabled healthcare that is sensitive to the information security requirements both of the NHS and the projects themselves. Although our motivation is principally derived from U.K.-based e-Health projects, this paper should be of interest to the worldwide health Grid community. By restricting ourselves to information security, we do not consider, for example, physical security or audit trail capabilities, which are outside the scope of this paper. The vision we describe is grounded in terms of experience, and reflects the challenges faced by the e-DiaMoND project team. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.