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This volume contains the proceedings of the seventh annual Event of the International Council on Medical and Care Compunetics (ICMCC), which will be held in London, UK, from 8–11 June 2010. ICMCC is an international foundation which acts as the knowledge centre for medical and care compunetics, i.e. for the field of the social, societal and ethical implications of computing and networking in health. In contrast to conferences addressing technology, dedicated scientific domains or specialized professionals, ICMCC follows a multidisciplinary approach by nature. Therefore, it addresses all entities involved in health issues such as health professionals, politicians, supporting specialist, administrators, researchers and developers, but primarily the subject of care – the patient or the citizen before they become a patient. ICMCC is unique on the global scene in this bridging and embracing functionality.
The theme of the 2010 annual event is “Personal Health – Intelligent solutions to serve empowered patients”. The seventh ICMCC annual event addresses the active participation of the citizen in his or her health and care pathway with the interactive use of Information and Communication Technologies, in other words; Patient 2.0 Empowerment as defined by ICMCC in 2008. The 2010 Event intends to combine ontology-driven health information system design for advanced interoperability with the paradigm change towards pervasive person-centric care, including prevention, home care and wellness, together forming adaptive distributed health information systems solutions. Important issues to be considered are virtual Electronic Health Records and Personal Health Records acting as a semantically interoperable communication and cooperation platform for personalized ubiquitous health services in a reliable environment.
The scientific topics presented in the proceedings comprise System Design and Evaluation, Computer-Assisted Learning, Knowledge Representation and Ontologies, Electronic Health Records and Patient Empowerment. 82 researchers, residing in 17 different countries from Europe, North and South America, and Asia, have reported their results in this volume. A comprehensive overview and in-depth, first hand information on new developments, advanced systems, technologies and applications will be introduced to an international audience.
The ICMCC has been supported by the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI), notably by the EFMI Working Groups “Electronic Health Records”, “Security, Safety and Ethics” and “Personal Portable Devices”.
The editors would like to thank the scientific board for their assistance and all the authors for their excellent work as well as the reviewers for lending their expertise to the conference. Last but not least the local organizers, for their contribution to the final achievements.
Lodewijk Bos (Event Chair), Bernd Blobel (Scientific Chair)