HealthGrid 2008 is the sixth conference in this series of open forums for the integration of grid technologies and its applications in the biomedical, medical and biological domains to pave the path to an international research area in healthgrids. The main objective of the HealthGrid conference and the HealthGrid Association is 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.Subjects in this publication reflect the diversity of mature practice: Advancing Virtual Communities, offering a glimpse of the kind of communities that are brought together by means of collaboration grids; Public Health Informatics, exploring the diffusion of grid concepts and technologies in health informatics; Translational Bioinformatics, the contact point between medicine, healthcare and genomics; and Knowledge Management and Decision Support, one direction that is confidently expected to grow as the synergy of grids and 'evidence-based practice' in healthcare is exploited.

This publication provides a forum for projects in the medical, biological and biomedical domains as well as for grid projects that seek to integrate these. The overall objective is to reinforce and promote the awareness of the deployment of grid technology in health. The emphasis is on results of current grid projects in health care. This will show in the outcome of field tests and will identify deployment strategies for prototype applications in health care. In addition, outstanding problem areas and technological challenges are identified and new solutions to these issues are proposed. From Grid to Healthgrid is divided in four themes: - Knowledge and Data Management - Deployments of Grids in Health - Current Projects and - Ethical, Legal, Social and Security Issues. The papers show that healthgrid has matured beyond its original projects and is now tackling some difficult problems that seemed intractable up till two years ago.