A Grid Based Approach to Share Public Health Surveillance Applications - The R Example

Introduction Currently, there’s little effective communication and collaboration among public health departments. The lack of collaboration has resulted in more than 300 separate biosurveillance systems (1), which are disease specific, not integrated or interoperable, and may be duplicative (1). Grid architecture is a promising methodology to aid in building a decentralized health surveillance infrastructure because it encourages an ecosystem development culture (2), which has the potential to increase collaboration and decrease duplications.