Preparing and publishing a first book on Accident and Emergency Informatics (A&EI) is not only an important task, but also an enormous accomplishment with a profound impact for the scientific and healthcare community. The International Medical Informatics Association, with its Working Group in A&EI, has worked in a productive and innovative way in this field for the last three years to introduce this research and application domain as a field of great interest; the Informatics in Emergency Medicine and Clinical Care.

This book is the outcome of many discussions, meetings, workshops, and scientific exchanges in the domain, as viewed and experienced by the distinguished editorial team and the expert and renowned authors. The ten chapters in the book are organised in four sections.

The first section is mostly dedicated to the framework for achieving an emergency-informatics health information infrastructure. The second part is focused on the sensory information gathering of critical clinical data related to the building up of a smart environment for A&EI. The third part introduces the state-of-the-art technologies of Virtual technology and the Internet-of-Things for integration into Virtual Emergency Registries. The final part considers the delicate issues of patient safety raised by the introduction of surveillance technologies into clinical care, along with other issues being tackled by the domain of A&EI in facing the challenges of the future. In addition, the final part discusses the principles and methods for evaluating A&EI applications; a critical challenge for gaining the acceptance of healthcare professionals.

It is clear that such a book, prepared as a concise edited volume and introducing a new domain such as A&EI for the first time faces a unique challenge to be up to date and to the point, to define principles, to formalise specific methodologies, to describe applications, to provide methods for evaluation and to see and foresee future challenges and suggest solutions. All these aspects have been considered and tackled in an excellent and masterful way in this book, which is an important contribution to the field of A&EI, making it very appropriate and suitable for recommendation to Healthcare Professionals and Informaticians wishing to understand and fathom the domain of Accident and Emergency Informatics.

John Mantas

Athens, 25 Jan 2022