Navigating Europe's maze of research organisations to find the right partner is no easy task. A new portal aims to lower the barriers to collaboration by raising the visibility of organisations, researchers and projects to facilitate community partnership building.

The European Commission used to concentrate primarily on funding research topics related to eHealth such as medical informatics and telemedicine. The EU's eHealth office has now expanded its eHealth repertoire to include deployment strategies and policies that support citizen-centered health systems across Europe. The Commission's eHealth vision is laid out in a Communication published in April 2004. A first crucial stepping-stone towards the plan’s achievement has already taken place: regional eHealth networks are functional and many examples can be found all over the EU. Today's focus is on interoperability and certification issues, according to European Commission official, Ilias Iakovidis, Deputy Head of the ICT for Health Unit of the Information Society and Media Directorate-General.

In 2005 at least one third of the European adult population, 130 million EU citizens, browsed the web in search of information on health. However, searching for health-related information is not always easy. Researchers can be confronted with thousands of sites, many of them complex, and it can be hard to know which are reliable or up to date. To help European citizens answer their health questions, the Commission has today launched the "Health-EU Portal". The launch event took place in Malaga, Spain, within the Commission-sponsored "eHealth" conference.

"It was a good idea, perfectly clear and so obvious. Many dangerous side effects could be prevented if each physician knew all drugs his patients are currently taking. So many unnecessary examinations could be avoided if physicians could inform themselves about all the examination results their colleagues obtained before them." These are the arguments of the electronic health card's advocates, and they are right. "If this health care data were collected and transmitted electronically and in a standardized way, millions of people could receive better and less expensive treatment" , is what the Financial Times Deutschland wrote in an otherwise critical comment on the introduction of the electronic health card in Germany.

The European Commission promotes the Bioinformatics Grid Application for life science (BioinfoGRID) project. The project aims to connect many European computer centres in order to carry out Bioinformatics research and to develop new applications in the sector using a network of services based on futuristic Grid networking technology that represents the natural evolution of the Web.

More specifically the BioinfoGRID project will make research in the fields of Genomics, Proteomics, Transcriptomics and applications in Molecular Dynamics much easier, reducing data calculation times thanks to the distribution of the calculation at any one time on thousands of computers across Europe and the world.

How do public administrations actually know what end users want and expect of their public services so as to set about satisfying their needs? An exhaustive European-wide survey of citizens' real needs regarding services such as e-government, e-health and e-learning, goes a long way towards answering this question.

Bringing together selected articles from the daily CORDIS News service, the CORDIS focus Newsletter is published in six languages (Spanish, German, English, French, Italian and Polish) and, for the time being, on a monthly basis.