G7: a framework for international cooperation in medical informatics.

The world's major economic powers, the G7, have initiated a collaborative International research and demonstration program to exploit the benefits of information and communications technology for society. The Global Healthcare Applications Project (GHAP) is investigating a variety of informatics applications in disease specific domains, telemedicine, and multilingual textual and image database systems. This paper summarizes the nine GHAP sub-projects undertaken to date, with emphasis on those in which the U.S. is a participant. The growing use of smart card technology, especially in Europe, is adding new impetus for similar medical and health experiments in the U.S. A pilot project now underway in several Western states is described.