"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.
Unit F3 "Research Infrastructure" supports the provision of computer and communications infrastructures of the highest quality and performance to Europe's researchers, namely by establishing a high-capacity and high-speed communications network for all researchers in Europe (GÉANT) and specific high performance Grid- enabled advanced test-beds, exploiting the benefits of a strong co-ordination between Research Infrastructures and the IST and an enlarged co-operation with corresponding national and international initiatives.
European Union Member States met for the first time to discuss the future of the i2010 strategy. The i2010 High Level Group held its inaugural meeting on 20 April 2006. The Group was established following a Commission Decision and is composed of one representative per Member State at Director General level. The Group decided to work, as a priority, on Convergence and content issues and on Trust and confidence, and to delegate the continuation of the work on eGovernment, eHealth and eInclusion to specific sub-groups.
The Framework Programme (FP) is the European Union's main instrument for funding research and development. The FP is proposed by the European Commission and adopted by Council and the European Parliament following a co-decision procedure. FPs have been implemented since 1984 and cover a period of five years with the last year of one FP and the first year of the following FP overlapping. The current FP is FP6, which will be running up to the end of 2006.