This volume contains the proceedings of the 11-th European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI, www.efmi.org) Special Topic Conference (STC) held in Budapest, Hungary 27th–29th April 2014. The EFMI STC 2014 is an important international forum for presenting results of current scientific work in health-informatics processes, systems, and technologies.

The EFMI STC is a major scientific meeting. It brings together computer and information science, medicine, and technology. The conference provides a comprehensive overview and in-depth, first hand information on new developments, advanced systems, technologies and applications.

The EFMI STC 2014 was organised by EFMI in collaboration with the Biomedical Section of the John von Neumann Computer Society (NJSZT, further details at: http://njszt.hu/en/neumann/about-njszt). It follows previous conferences in Bucharest, Romania (2001), Nicosia, Cyprus (2002), Rome, Italy (2003), Munich, Germany (2004), Athens, Greece (2005), Timişoara, Romania (2006), Brijuni Island, Croatia (2007), London, UK (2008), Antalya, Turkey (2009), Reykjavik, Iceland (2010), Laško, Slovenia (2011), Moscow, Russia (2012), and Prague, Czech Republic (2013).

The theme of the STC 2014 is “Cross-border challenges in informatics with a focus on disease surveillance and utilising big-data”, addressing a range of important aspects of pan-European and cross-border issues. The conference contains sections providing state of the art presentations on the following theme areas:

• Health data sharing, integration opportunities and challenges across European borders,

• Sources of data, including big data, for monitoring health and disease,

• Using routine data for epidemiological study and public health.

The EFMI Working Groups supporting the conference include “EFMI WG PCI Primary Care Informatics” and “EFMI WG HIIC Health Informatics for Interregional Cooperation”.

The objective of the conference, reflected in the contents of the present volume, was to highlight health-related use of data and the use of these data for monitoring and preventing ill health and disease. They include reports about collaboration at regional, national, and international level. Achieving and maintaining cross-border interoperability of electronic health record systems implies managing the continuous process of change and adaptation of a multitude of elements within and across electronic infrastructures in neighboring countries.

The volume contains twenty-three full papers and poster extended abstracts from specialists of the field. The papers have been selected by the Scientific Program Committee (SPC) out of forty-five submissions of papers, posters, and workshop proposals sent by experts from all over Europe, Russia, Israel and South Africa. Each submission has been reviewed by three reviewers selected from a list of internationally acknowledged domain experts from all continents. The SPC members wish to express their gratitude to the reviewers for the work, which was carried out with the utmost care. All the reviewers' names are listed in the following chapter of these Proceedings.

The topics presented at EFMI STC 2014 are interdisciplinary in nature and consequently of interest to a variety of professionals: medical informatics, bioinformatics, and health informatics scientists, medical computing and technology specialists, public health, health insurance and health institutional administrators, physicians, nurses, and other allied health personnel, as well as representatives of industry and consultancy in the various health fields.

The editors wish to thank the conference patron Dr. Miklós Szócska, Minister of State for Health of the Republic of Hungary. We wish to extended our thanks to Comp-Rend Ltd. for managing the conference and the website (www.stc2014.org), to Thomas Schabetsberger for facilitating the online congress management, and to Bernd Blobel for his caring advice with these Proceedings giving the editors a big part of his vast experience in the field. Finally, we wish to thank the local organizing committee: Dr. István Kósa, István Nagy, Gergely Héja, Gabriella Merth, and Szilvia Tóth-Csuzi.

The editors would like to thank again to all of the authors for their excellent work and the reviewers for their expertise and careful review of the papers.

Lăcrămioara Stoicu-Tivadar, Simon de Lusignan, Andrej Orel,

Rolf Engelbrecht and György Surján

Editors