E-business today has moved focus to information sharing and integration across organisational boundaries in an effort to transform business processes throughout the value chain and standardize collaboration among communicating entities. Healthcare comprises a strongly collaborative distributed business environment in which information value plays a strategic role and informational privacy comprises a great concern. This new era in e-business, however, is followed by a series of issues that need to be addressed both at application and infrastructural level, such as information heterogeneity, system interoperability, security and privacy. The Grid as a technology enables sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of distributed resources comes to fill these gaps. In this chapter, the communication of information among healthcare organisations operating over a Grid infrastructure will be presented and analysed both from a technical and a business perspective.

E-business today has moved focus to information sharing and integration across organisational boundaries in an effort to transform business processes throughout the value chain and standardize collaboration among communicating entities. Healthcare comprises a strongly collaborative distributed business environment in which information value plays a strategic role and informational privacy comprises a great concern. This new era in e-business, however, is followed by a series of issues that need to be addressed both at application and infrastructural level, such as information heterogeneity, system interoperability, security and privacy. The Grid as a technology enables sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of distributed resources comes to fill these gaps. In this chapter, the communication of information among healthcare organisations operating over a Grid infrastructure will be presented and analysed both from a technical and a business perspective.

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