‘Towards global health: the informatics route to knowledge’ is the theme of MEDINFO 2001. The theme is the result of a reflection about the kind of research that is performed in leading institutions of medical informatics. Of course not all submitted papers will cover this theme, but it is expected that quite a number of papers will do.

In the opinion of the SPC Co-chairs the theme was appropriate. Many papers were submitted in the areas of knowledge representation (e.g. guideline representation, natural language processing, terminology), decision support, and information management, thus emphasizing the knowledge aspect. Other papers concerned the technical infrastructure, standards, security, ethical, legal, and social issues, emphasizing aspects of global access to knowledge and information.

As is especially apparent during conferences like MEDINFO 2001, Medical (or Health) Informatics is a very broad discipline. It not only covers the earlier mentioned subjects but also such areas as signal and image processing, robotics and virtual reality, bio -informatics, evaluation, education and training, etc. A relatively new subject is Consumer Health Informatics. Quite a number of papers discuss the position of patients when their medical information is communicated to other care providers and how they can obtain trustworthy knowledge about their disease.

We obtained about 700 paper and poster submissions. These submissions were refereed by 250 referees. Only about 270 papers could be accepted for oral presentation. Therefore we selected a number of good submissions and proposed to their authors to resubmit them as posters.

In addition to papers and posters also proposals for workshops and panels were invited. About 60 proposals were received. The SPC in their Venice meeting discussed all of the proposals and selected the ones that did fit best in the program.

We wish to thank the members of the SPC, EC and OC for their efforts. Special thanks go to the referees. We are confident that MEDINFO 2001 will be a worthy successor of the earlier MEDINFO conferences.

Arie Hasman and Hiroshi Takeda

SPC co-chairs