Current demographic, economic and social conditions which developed countries are faced with require a paradigm change for delivering high quality and efficient health services. In that context, healthcare systems have to turn from organization-centered to process-oriented and finally towards individualized patient care, also called personal care, based on ehealth platform services. Interoperability requirements for ubiquitous personalized health services reach beyond current concepts of health information integration among professional stakeholders and related Electronic Patient Records. Future personal health platforms particularly have to maintain semantic interoperability among systems using different modalities and technologies, different knowledge representation and domain experts’ languages as well as different coding schemes and terminologies to include home care, as well as personal and mobile systems. This development is not restricted to regions or countries, but appears globally, requiring a comprehensive international collaboration. This publication within the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics presents papers from leading international experts representing all domains involved in ehealth.

Current demographic, economic and social conditions which developed countries are faced with require a paradigm change for delivering high quality and efficient health services. In that context, healthcare systems have to turn from organization-centered to process-oriented and finally towards individualized patient care, also called personal care, based on ehealth platform services. Interoperability requirements for ubiquitous personalized health services reach beyond current concepts of health information integration among professional stakeholders and related Electronic Patient Records. Future personal health platforms particularly have to maintain semantic interoperability among systems using different modalities and technologies, different knowledge representation and domain experts' languages as well as different coding schemes and terminologies to include home care, as well as personal and mobile systems. This development is not restricted to regions or countries, but appears globally, requiring a comprehensive international collaboration. This publication within the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics presents papers from leading international experts representing all domains involved in ehealth.

In Medical Informatics three types of processes play a central role: organizational, patient-related and decision making-related processes. The first type deals with settings, such as a hospital care setting or a primary care setting; the second is related to health and disease (i.e. to patients); the third type of process aims at assisting in decision making and therapy and evolves in the brains of healthcare professionals. Hence, in all domains data, information and knowledge play a key role. As these three processes evolve, dealing with individuals – patients, doctors and nurses – because of that human factor there are obviously limitations imposed by formalization and standardization. In the past, there have been some unrealistic expectations regarding the possible contributions of medical informatics to healthcare. However, such contributions appeared to be very modest, to say the least. The same applies to the overly optimistic expectations regarding the introduction of electronic health records. Although the technology is widely available, all these developments appear to be far more complex than expected. The need for an improved understanding of the nature of medical knowledge to better serve health remains to be emphasized.

This publication reflects the objective of the conference to highlight large scale projects supporting the use of information and communication technology (eHealth) at national, regional, and also at international level. It results in requirements for national and regional solutions for medical informatics and health information management.

Medical informatics and electronic healthcare have many benefits to offer in terms of quality of life for patients, healthcare personnel, citizens and society in general. But evidence-based medicine needs quality information if it is to lead to quality of health and thus to quality of life. This book presents the full papers accepted for presentation at the MIE2012 conference, held in Pisa, Italy, in August 2012. The theme of the 2012 conference is ‘Quality of Life through Quality of Information’. As always, the conference provides a unique platform for the exchange of ideas and experiences among the actors and stakeholders of ICT supported healthcare. The book incorporates contributions related to the latest achievements in biomedical and health informatics in terms of major challenges such as interoperability, collaboration, coordination and patient-oriented healthcare at the most appropriate level of care. It also offers new perspectives for the future of biomedical and health Informatics, critical appraisal of strategies for user involvement, insights for design, deployment and the sustainable use of electronic health records, standards, social software, citizen centred e-health, and new challenges in rehabilitation and social care informatics. The topics presented are interdisciplinary in nature and will be of interest to a variety of professionals; physicians, nurses and other allied health providers, health informaticians, engineers, academics and representatives from industry and consultancy in the various fields.

The first part of the MIE 2008 conference theme - eHealth Beyond the Horizon - highlights the expectations for the future of ehealth and raises the question: What sort of developments in ehealth services can we imagine emerging above the horizon in the years to come? EHealth Beyond the Horizon contains a good number of high-quality papers giving different perspectives of this future, some of them already available today in picot scale, some of them outlined in visions. The second part of the theme - Get IT There - has triggered a large number of papers describing how to create, evaluate, adjust and deliver products and deploy services in healthcare organizations for the necessary information technology as a basis for the ehealth applications that are essential in order to respond to the challenges of the health systems. The papers in the proceedings are grouped by themes according to the submission categories and the supplied keywords. As the last theme, three doctoral students from different areas of medical informatics were selected to present and discuss their research under the guidance of a panel of distinguished research faculties.

Pervasive healthcare is an emerging research discipline, focusing on the development and application of pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology for healthcare and wellness. Pervasive healthcare seeks to respond to a variety of pressures on healthcare systems, including the increased incidence of life-style related and chronic diseases, emerging consumerism in healthcare, need for empowering patients and relatives for self-care and management of their health, and need to provide seamless access for healthcare services, independent of time and place. Pervasive healthcare may be defined from two perspectives. First, it is the development and application of pervasive computing (or ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence) technologies for healthcare, health and wellness management. Second, it seeks to make healthcare available to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare. This book proposes to define the emerging area of pervasive health and introduce key management principles, most especially knowledge management, its tools, techniques and technologies. In addition, the book takes a socio-technical, patient-centric approach which serves to emphasize the importance of a key triumvirate in healthcare management namely, the focus on people, process and technology. Last but not least the book discusses in detail a specific example of pervasive health, namely the potential use of a wireless technology solution in the monitoring of diabetic patients.