A roadmap for caGrid, an enterprise Grid architecture for biomedical research.

caGrid is a middleware system which combines the Grid computing, the service oriented architecture, and the model driven architecture paradigms to support development of interoperable data and analytical resources and federation of such resources in a Grid environment. The functionality provided by caGrid is an essential and integral component of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program. This program is established by the National Cancer Institute as a nationwide effort to develop enabling informatics technologies for collaborative, multi-institutional biomedical research with the overarching goal of accelerating translational cancer research. Although the main application domain for caGrid is cancer research, the infrastructure provides a generic framework that can be employed in other biomedical research and healthcare domains. The development of caGrid is an ongoing effort, adding new functionality and improvements based on feedback and use cases from the community. This paper provides an overview of potential future architecture and tooling directions and areas of improvement for caGrid and caGrid-like systems. This summary is based on discussions at a roadmap workshop held in February with participants from biomedical research, Grid computing, and high performance computing communities.

Standard-based EHR-enabled applications for clinical research and patient safety: CDISC - IHE QRPH - EHR4CR & SALUS collaboration.

Integration profiles collaboratively developed by CDISC and IHE for integrating data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with clinical research and pharmacovigilance are limited to resolving lexical/syntactic data integration issues and do not address semantic barriers. This paper describes the collaboration between two European projects - EHR4CR and SALUS - in implementing ISO/IEC 11179-based metadata registries (MDRs) and semantically integrated cross-platform data access. A common "semantic MDR" provides a framework for bidirectional/cross-MDR mapping and federated queries are enabled using the newly-defined IHE Data Exchange (DEX) profile. In the pilot implementation, mappings for 178 EHR4CR and 199 SALUS metadata elements were persisted in the semantic MDR. The DEX profile was then used to access semantically equivalent data elements in SALUS or EHR4CR participating EHR systems. ISO/IEC 11179-based MDRs and DEX integration profile address the goal of developing pan-EU computable semantic integration of data from clinical care, clinical research, and patient safety platforms.