The International Workshop on Acceptance of Telematics Applications by Healthcare Professionals, called “Education and Training in Health Telematics”, took place 11-12 December, 1998 in Thessaloniki, Greece, supported by the Information Society Programme of the European Commission and the European People's Party of the European Parliament.

This workshop is the second part of the series of workshop on Acceptance of Telematics Applications by Healthcare Professionals. The first has focused on the existing “Convincing cases” and the proceedings have been published in the IOS press series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics (#56). The next workshop of this series will be devoted to the user-friendliness of the health telematics systems and its role in improving the user acceptance.

This book contains the presentations of the participants of the 2^nd European Workshop on Acceptance of Telematics Applications by Healthcare Professionals, “Education and Training in Health Telematics”. The contributions describe on the current health telematics education programmes offered in universities, the continuing education programmes and the new ideas in training for the “just in time” learning.

We would like to acknowledge the excellent contributions of all the experts from Europe and North America that have presented current programmes in education and training in health telematics and the stimulating discussions on the importance and challenges of both continuous education and “just-in-time” training schemes for improvement of user acceptance. We would also like Dr. Ch. Safran and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of the Harvard Medical School for the teleconference and demonstration.

Finally, special thanks goes to the numerous students of health telematics classes offered in universities of 3 different cities of Greece, namely Thessaloniki, Athens and Patras. We believe that their participation was the “life” of the workshop and the most important element of the very successful meeting.

Antonios Trakatellis

Stavroula Maglavera

Ilias Iakovidis