The SEISMED project was initiated in 1992 as the result of the fusion of two attractive security proposals to the Advanced Informatics in Medicine [AIM] secretariat, SEISMIC and PIMEDIS. It has proved to be a very successful project bringing together a number of partners from the Medical Informatics and the IT Security fields. The project developed an extensive series of Guidelines covering different aspects of security from the point of view of Health Information Systems.

The material presented here comprises the key security Guidelines developed by the project and tested in its four Reference Centres. For ease of reading and simplicity much of the detailed contextual material that accompanied their development over the four years that the project lasted has not been included. However it is believed that this publication comprises the concentrated guidance that can help to ensure that appropriate security is injected into European Health Information Systems. The full copies of all the publically available SEISMED deliverables are available from either the NHS Information Management Centre or from the original main author should anyone wish to have the full set of explanatory material.

The SEISMED Co-ordinating Partner would like to take this opportunity of thanking the members of the consortium for their work which made this book possible and in particular the first co-ordinating partner who set the consortium on track during the initial phases of the project. In addition, all members of the consortium would like to express their thanks for the support that they received from the AIM project officers, Gottfried Dietzel and Jens Christensen, and the encouragement received from the former Head of the AIM office, Niels Rossing, at all phases of the project development. In addition, they would like to express their thanks to Brian Molteno of the NHS Information Management Centre, David Preston of the NHS Executive and Brian Jones of the Department of Trade and Industry who assisted in the successful negotiations that led to the successful transfer of the prime contractor role during the summer of 1994.

The SEISMED Consortium takes responsibility as a whole for the material presented and all members of the consortium participated to a greater or lesser degree in the preparation, examination, development and quality assurance of the SEISMED deliverables. However, the Workpackage leaders, under whose names the various Guidelines are listed, took the key responsibility for preparing and presenting the material and revising it in the light of consortium discussions. In addition, Kees Louwerse and Sokratis Katsikas took extra responsibility for editing the text in the context of the presentation of these Guidelines within a single book and Alison Treacher undertook the difficult task of extracting the key issues in each of the deliverables and synthesising them into a readable whole.

The consortium would, also, like to express their gratitude to Sue Riddlesdin for her help in organising the process of preparing and formatting the electronic version of the text in preparation for printing.

Barry Barber