The Ninth HealthGrid conference took place in Bristol at the Frenchay Campus of the University of the West of England (UK) from Monday 27th to Tuesday 28th June 2011. Every year, this conference offers the opportunity to share ideas and discuss the state of the art for the integration of grid and cloud practices and e-infrastructures into the fields of biology, bioinformatics, biomedicine and healthcare, focusing on different aspects of middleware, technologies, applications and deployment issues.