Australia has a long history of involvement in the progress of health informatics. Through substantial endeavours in theory and practice, in numerous arenas including software development, standardisation, evaluation, policy development and education, Australian contributors have made impacts on the world health informatics scene.

Much of this work has been reported annually at ‘HIC’ – the annual Health Informatics Conference series hosted by the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA). After 19 years, this meeting has ‘come of age’ to constitute the premier Australian academic platform for a wide range of topics in health informatics. In acknowledgement of this status, HIC 2011 offers its proceedings of full scientific papers for the first time in this monograph format, enabling international access to this highly selective showcase of current Australian health informatics research. We are proud to take our place in a publication series that caters for major international conference proceedings in health informatics, including MedInfo and Medical Informatics Europe.

The theme for HIC 2011 draws on a fundamental aspect of health informatics: its ability to transform processes and practices within healthcare through innovation. These transformations address topics over a wide range of different sectors in the health system, from primary and acute care to preventative and public health. It is a hallmark of many of the papers that they not only provide solid background and technical substance in their content, but also exhibit practical implementations and demonstrations of their worth.

All papers appearing in this collection have been subject to double blind peer review by at least three members of the panel of experts, convened specifically for this purpose. The peer review process for HIC includes detailed feedback comments from reviewers, to which authors are required to respond formally when providing the final revised versions of their papers. The Scientific Program Committee members oversaw the selection of papers from those which were ranked highly during review, and ultimately 24 papers were selected from 39 submitted. Collectively these offer a comprehensive profile of active research areas in Australian health informatics.

David P. Hansen

Anthony J. Maeder

Louise K. Schaper