Any type of E-Business including E-Health is growing up changing our world. New generations of Internet-based health information systems intend to meet the challenge of new economy concerning requirements for high efficiency, efficacy, and high quality of care and welfare. Distribution, communication, interoperability, internationalisation, and even globalisation became valid paradigms. Architects and implementers of health information systems work to respond to the requirements and answer countless questions. For making products, solutions became topics of standards developing organisations. The world changed so quickly that it became impossible being updated enough to contribute to the emerging development or at least to use the achievements. As development and knowledge explode, also papers and books became innumerable, describing problems and the state of the art. Many technical books go into depth. Sometimes, papers are talking about challenges and principles without offering appropriate solutions.

This book offers an extended walk trough the domain of health information systems covering all the different aspects from architecture to security. Nevertheless, the broadness of concern is accompanied by a challenging depth in many parts of the presentation. The book addresses medical informaticians, computer scientists, software developers, system architects, system administrators, decision makers, and also users. Each group will find some chapters or sections answering special questions of that audience. To facilitate the flexible use of the book, it has been written in chained chapters, nevertheless offering the opportunity of being interested in, and reading, one chapter only. Therefore, the chapters are completed from introduction up to summary.

Beside practical reports, three paradigms draw the thread through the book: Component-orientation, meta-modelling (UML), and the XML markup language. Following these paradigms, openness, flexibility, scalability, portability, and interoperability of systems should be provided.

Being engaged in many standardisation bodies, the author embraces the healthcare systems turn to the shared care paradigm, analyses the most important architectural approaches for health information systems, introduces the current work on new generation of electronic health records, and presents requirements, standards, and solutions for advanced security services. Thereby, the author covers established systems and upcoming developments for future systems of the next decade as well.

The book benefits from the author's active participation in European projects leading in the field. Being responsible for work items and task forces, he is influencing the direction medical informatics goes into. This is especially true in the domain of health information systems and Electronic health record architecture. But also in the domain of privacy and security for health information systems the author is well accepted internationally. Due to his chairmanship in the European Federation of Medical Informatics (EFMI) Working Groups “Electronic Health Record” and “Security” as well as in HL7 and CORBA Technical Committees and Working Groups, the author presents not only his knowledge but also the knowledge of co-operating international experts.

The theoretical considerations are mostly combined with practical specifications and implementations. This has been done using an acknowledged demonstrator piloting new solutions for health information systems and health networks: the Magdeburg regional Clinical Cancer Registry and its ONCONET. Sometimes, some more examples for the practical deployment of the results and proposed solutions would be desirable. On the other hand however, the extension of the book sets some limitations.

The inclusion of many important contributions from others has been made. Thereby, many references have to be ignored in such a broad field avoiding a reference list longer than the book itself.

I wish the reader an enjoyable lecture.

Giessen, April 2002

Prof. Dr. Joachim W. Dudeck