Towards a sustainable solution for collaborative healthcare research

Abstract

This paper describes a novel web-based environment that empowers healthcare research communities to efficiently and effectively collaborate thanks to reliable and user-friendly access to integrated and interoperable resources of different types. The proposed solution enables heterogeneous data and knowledge sources, as well as healthcare-related processing methodologies and tools, to be wrapped through appropriate web services. The paper sketches the motivation behind the proposed solution, discusses its architecture and types of services to be integrated, and comments on the foreseen advancements in healthcare research from a technological, a collaborative and an organizational perspective.