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 organisation-centred to process-oriented and finally towards individualised patient care, also called personal care, based on eHealth platform services. Interoperability requirements for ubiquitous personalised health services reach beyond current concepts of health information integration among professional stakeholders and related Electronic Patient Records. Future personal health platforms have particularly 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.

From December 2nd to 5th, 2007, the eHealth Competence Center (eHCC) supported by the International Center for Telemedicine (ICT) at the University of Regensburg Medical Center and several other organisations such as IMIA, EFMI, ISfTeH and the Czech Society of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics, organised an International Conference on eHealth thereby aiming at uniquely combining Health Telematics, Telemedicine, Biomedical Engineering and Bioinformatics to the edge. This Global Experts Summit Textbook within the Series “Studies in Health Technology and Informatics” at IOS Press presents invited speeches from internationally leading experts representing all domains involved in eHealth. The International Conference has been completed through specific seminars, workshops and symposia addressing collaboration and potential projects between Europe and Latin America (ELAN), analysing cross-border activities between Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland, promoting current eHealth achievements of MEDTEL (Prague, CZ), and presenting poster submissions to the conference concerning telematics and telemedical applications. Those results have been jointly published at IOS Press, Amsterdam, and Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Aka GmbH, Berlin.

The editors would like to thank all the invited authors for their excellent contributions. Furthermore, they thank the Gold Sponsors Siemens AG Medical Solutions, InterComponentWare AG and InterSystems GmbH, and also HL7 Germany, AGFA HealthCare GmbH, ID-Berlin GmbH, ManaThea GmbH and SAP AG for their inevitable support.

Bernd Blobel, Regensburg, December 2007