HealthGrid 2006 (http://valencia2006.healthgrid.org) is an open forum for the exchange and discussion of ideas, technologies, solutions and requirements that interest the Grid and the Life-Sciences communities to foster the integration of Grids into Health.
Participation is encouraged for Grid middleware and Grid applications developers, Biomedical and Health Informatics users and security and policy makers to participate in a set of multidisciplinary sessions with a common concern on the applications to Health.

This will be the fourth annual HealthGrid conference.

The first conference, held in 2003 in Lyon (http://lyon2003.healthgrid.org), reflected the need to involve all actors – physicians, scientists and technologists – who might play a part in the application of Grid technology to Health, whether health care or bio-medical research.

The second conference, held in Clermont-Ferrand in January 2004 (http://clermont2004.healthgrid.org) reported research and work in progress from a large number of projects.

The third conference of Oxford (http://oxford2005.healthgrid.org) had a major concern on the results and deployment strategies in Healthcare. Finally, this issue aims at consolidating the collaboration among Biologists, Healthcare professionals and Grid Technology experts.

The conference will include a number of high-profile keynote presentations complemented by a set of high quality refereed papers which will be selected through the present call for papers. The selected papers will be published in the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics published by IOS Press (http://www.iospress.nl/).

Papers are invited in (but not limited to) the following areas and topics:

1. HealthGrid Applications (Health Care, Epidemiology, Bioinformatics, Medical Research, Simulation, Biomedicine).
2. Grid Middleware for Health Applications.
3. Ethics, Security, Privacy, Data Protection and Patient Consent of HealthGrids.
4. Knowledge Management in HealthGrids, Medical Ontologies, Data Mining, Data Mediation and Integration, Standardisation.
5. Virtual Organisations in HealthGrids.
6. High-Performance and Distributed Computing in Health and Biology.
7. Testbed and End user Test, Unresolved Technological Issues in HealthGrids.
8. Challenging Computing Problems in Health.

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

Contributions can be made as full research papers (up to 5,000 words in length, and maximum 10 pages) and / or as demonstrations.
Selection for oral or poster presentation will be based on the content of the submitted papers, their originality and contribution, technical quality, style and clarity of presentation and importance to the field.
All conference participants will receive a complimentary copy of the articles on CD.
The selected papers will be published in a volume in the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.
All papers should be submitted through the web.

IMPORTANT DATES

Track	Submis. Deadline	Author Notification	Camera-ready
Research paper	31th January 2006	15th February 2006	6th March 2006
Demo proposal	31st January 2006	15th February 2006	6th March 2006

The guidelines for authors and support tools are those of the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics to be found at (http://www.iospress.nl/navfr/authcofr.html).
All papers submitted for the conference, once published, will also appear online at http://www.healthgrid.org.
It will be possible to request for both demonstration and either poster or oral presentation.

CONFERENCE COMMITTEES

Vicente Hernández (Conference Chair)	UPV, Spain
Jean-Marie Auger (Observer)	European Commission, Belgium
Jean-Claude Healy (Observer)	World Health Organisation, Belgium
Yannick Legré (HealthGrid President)	CNRS, France
Ignacio Blanquer (Programme Chair)	UPV, Spain