This volume contains the proceedings of the Tenth EFMI Special Topic Conference that will be held in Reykjavik, Iceland, from 2–4 June 2010. The EFMI STC 2010 is Europe's leading forum for presenting results of current scientific work in health-informatics processes, systems, and technologies.

Achievements in this area will be introduced to an international audience. As a major event for science, medicine, and technology, the conference provides a comprehensive overview and in-depth, first hand information on new developments, advanced systems, technologies and applications.

The EFMI STC 2010 was organized by the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) in cooperation with Fókus – the Icelandic Health Informatics Society and the Icelandic Society of Information Processing. It follows previous conferences in Bucharest, Romania (2001), Nicosia, Cyprus (2002), Rome, Italy (2003), Munich, Germany (2004), Athens, Greece (2005), Timisoara, Romania (2006), Brijuni Island, Croatia (2007), London, UK (2008), and Antalya, Turkey (2009).

The EFMI STC 2010, entitled “Seamless Care – Safe Care: the Challenges of Interoperability and Patient Safety in Health Care”, is dedicated to different aspects of interoperability and its implications for patient safety. Traceability is an important facilitator for interoperability and safety. Those multiple aspects were the reason for a strong engagement of the EFMI Working Groups “Electronic Health Records”, “Security, Safety and Ethics” and “Traceability” in this conference.

These proceedings contain two invited keynotes from eminent scientists, one session keynote as well as 25 full papers. The papers have been selected by the Scientific Programme Committee (SPC) out of 61 submissions of papers, posters, panel and workshop proposals from experts from 23 countries. Each submission has been reviewed by three reviewers, which have been selected from a list of 486 internationally acknowledged domain experts from all continents. The SPC chair and vice-chair are especially thankful to all reviewers, which have been listed in the proceedings.

The scientific topics presented in the proceedings comprise Electronic Health Records and Personal Health Records; Traceability; Security, Privacy, Safety, and Quality; Interoperability and Standards; Patient Empowerment and Patient Satisfaction; Patient Safety and Continuity of Care; Device Integration; Process and Systems Evaluation; and Case Mix.

Most of the topics presented at EFMI STC 2010 are interdisciplinary in nature of interest to a variety of professionals: medical informatics, bioinformatics, and health informatics scientists, medical computing and technology specialists, public health, health insurance and health institutional administrators, physicians, nurses, and other allied health personnel, and representatives of industry and consultancy in the various health fields.

90 researchers, residing in 18 different countries from Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, have reported their results in this volume.

The EFMI STC 2010 has been completed through panels on special topics, plenary poster sessions, and workshops such as the HL7/GS1 Joint Workshop, a Joint Workshop organized by the European eHealth Project epSOS and the European Thematic Network for eHealth Interoperability (CALLIOPE), but also the Joint Workshop of the EU 7FP Projects PSIP, EU-ADR and debugIT. Further 41 experts will present their poster, panel and workshop submissions to the conference, extending the number of actively representing countries to 20.

The editors would like to thank all the authors for their excellent work as well as the reviewers for lending their expertise to the conference, thereby contributing to the final achievements. Furthermore, they are indebted to HL7 International and GS1 Europe for sponsoring the print of the proceedings, but also the Ministry of Health and the University of Iceland for their inevitable support.

Bernd Blobel, Ebba Þóra Hvannberg, Valgerður Gunnarsdótir (Editors)