Supporting security-oriented, inter-disciplinary research: crossing the social, clinical and geospatial domains

How many people have had a chronic disease for longer than 5-years in Scotland? How has this impacted upon their choices of employment? Are there any geographical clusters in Scotland where a high-incidence of patients with such long-term illness can be found? How does the life expectancy of such individuals compare with the national averages? Such questions are important to understand the health of nations and the best ways in which health care should be delivered and measured for their impact and success. In tackling such research questions, e-Infrastructures need to provide tailored, secure access to an extensible range of distributed resources including primary and secondary e-Health clinical data; social science data, and geospatial data sets amongst numerous others. In this paper we describe the security models underlying these e-Infrastructures and demonstrate their implementation in supporting secure, federated access to a variety of distributed and heterogeneous data sets exploiting the results of a variety of projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow

Using a Model to Evaluate the Impact of Managed Care on Medicaid-Eligible Moms and Their Children in a Rural Population

This paper lays out the advantages of using a model for developing research questions and methodologies aimed at evaluating how managed care arrangements for rural Medicaid moms and their children might affect their access to health care and their related health status. The PRECEDE (predisposing, reinforcing, and enabling causes in educational diagnosis and evaluation) health-education program planning model is refined and applied to a population of Medicaid-eligible moms and their children to help organize and clarify the research questions and to identify the types of variables we need to consider for this exercise. An explanation of those variables, why they are important, and how they can be obtained is presented.