Joining up health and bioinformatics: e-science meets e-health

Abstract

CLEF (Co-operative Clinical e-Science Framework) is an MRC sponsored project in the eScience programme that aims to establish methodologies and a technical infrastructure for the next generation of integrated clinical and bioscience research. It is developing methods for managing and using pseudonymised repositories of the long-term patient histories which can be linked to genetic, genomic information or used to support patient care. CLEF concentrates on removing key barriers to managing such repositories – ethical issues, information capture, integration of disparate sources into coherent “chronicles” of events, useroriented mechanisms for querying and displaying the information, and compiling the required knowledge resources. This paper describes the overall information flow and technical approach designed to meet these aims within a Grid framework