The MIE'99 (Medical Informatics Europe) conference is the 15^th in the series of conferences organised by European Federation of Medical Informatics and is organised in alternation with the MEDINFO (World Congress on Medical Informatics) organised by IMIA (International Medical Informatics Association). For the last conference in this millennium Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia has been selected by the EFMI board. The motto of this year’s conference “Bridges of Knowledge” reflects this historical event - bridges between millenniums, and bridges between various countries and various disciplines.

The response to the call for papers was overwhelming, 263 contributions from 28 different countries were received and 208 high quality papers were accepted for oral or poster presentations. Each paper has been reviewed by at least two reviewers coming from 35 countries. The quality, clarity and originality were the main criteria for accepting or rejecting a paper.

All accepted presentations presented in this proceedings are divided into following topics:

- Information systems in health care and medicine

- Telemedicine and telematics

- Security

- Biomedical processing, data analysis and image processing

- Data warehousing, data mining and knowledge discovery

- Training and education

- Internet/Intranet

- Resources management

- Intelligent medical systems

- Health guidelines and protocols

- Electronic patient encounter, card technology, electronic data interchange

- Terminology

- Nursing informatics.

The presented papers not only reflect the "state of the art", but present many new exciting ideas that will guide the progress of medical informatics in the new millenium. The editors of the proceedings would like to thank all that in some or another way contributed in the production of the proceedings. Specially acknowledge goes to:

• All authors for presenting their valuable ideas

• Reviewers and programming committee for selecting the papers and improving their quality

• The staff of Laboratory of System Design (University of Maribor, Slovenia) for managing the contributions from early draft to final camera ready copy

• Organising committee for their support in all stages of the proceeding’s production process and

• IOS Press for being so kind to publish it.

Peter Kokol

Blaž Zupan

Janez Stare

Marjan Premik

Rolf Engelbrecht