This volume contains the accepted full papers, short communication papers, and poster papers from the 31st Medical Informatics in Europe Conference (MIE2021) held virtually from 29–31 May 2021. MIE 2021 was originally due to be held in Athens, Greece, according to the EFMI Council decision, but due to the continuing gravity of the pandemic situation across the globe at the time of the Call for Papers and Proposals, it was decided, for the safety of participants, that the conference would be held as a virtual event. The Conference has been organized by the MCO Congress, and the Scientific Programme Committee was chaired by Professor John Mantas, Fellow of EFMI, and President of the Greek Biomedical and Health Informatics Association (GBHI).

For some years, both eHealth applications and digitalization have been considered fundamental paradigm changers in the new era of health informatics and public health. Massive amounts of data from molecular biology and about the environment, behaviour and lifestyle, exposition factors and personal records, coupled with the rise of unprecedented processing power in health information systems and artificial intelligence, as well as health analytics methods and tools, have empowered the medicine, nursing and healthcare sciences facing the challenges posed by public health. The current pandemic situation has emphasized the importance of health informatics for the scientific process of evidence-based reasoning and decision making at all levels of healthcare.

In this 31st annual experience, there will be special tracks with European projects, and discussions on the building of global frameworks to improve the data usability necessary to support life science research across borders, systems, and languages. Ethical and legal experts, contributing to specific tracks devoted to encryption, Blockchain and privacy-conscious data sharing, will investigate and propose practical ways to support innovations which will help to alleviate the burden of diseases such as COVID-19 and promote surveillance networks.

This volume incorporates 261 papers presented during the conference, and these proceedings are published as an e-book, with open access for ease of use and browsing without losing any of the advantages of indexing and citation, in the biggest Scientific Literature Databases, such as Medline and Scopus as part of the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics (HTI) from IOS Press.

The Editors would like to thank the Members of the Scientific Programme Committee, namely John Mantas (chair), Lăcrămioara Stoicu-Tivadar (co-chair), Catherine Chronaki, Arie Hasman, Patrick Weber, Parisis Gallos, and Mihaela Crişan-Vida, the EFMI Executive Officer Rebecca Randell, and Christian Lovis for supporting the continuous education accreditation. But mostly, we would like to thank the reviewers who have performed a very professional service, enabling a high-quality publishing achievement for a successful scientific event.

Athens, 24.04.2021

The Editors,

John Mantas, Lăcrămioara Stoicu-Tivadar, Catherine Chronaki, Arie Hasman, Patrick Weber, Parisis Gallos, Mihaela Crişan-Vida, Emmanouil Zoulias, Oana Sorina Chirila