The 34th Medical Informatics Europe Conference, MIE 2024, was held in Athens, Greece, from the 25–29 August 2024. The Conference was co-hosted by the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and the Greek Biomedical and Health Informatics Association (GBHIA). The Scientific Programme Committee was chaired by Professor John Mantas with Professor Arie Hasman as co-chair.

The theme of MIE 2024 is Digital Health and Informatics Innovations for Sustainable Healthcare Systems. Given the current and future shortages in the healthcare workforce, it is crucial to gain insight into the approaches and innovations available to mitigate the negative impact of these shortages on healthcare. For quite some time now, the WHO has been promoting the use of information and communications technologies for healthcare and medical purposes to enhance the efficiency of health systems in the delivery of quality, affordable, and equitable care. The WHO developed a global strategy on digital health for 2020–2025, in which digital health was defined as the field of knowledge and practice associated with the development and use of digital technologies to improve health. The success of this global strategy depends, to a great extent, on the state of the art of health-information technology and the outcomes of health-informatics research. The availability of professionals with a knowledge of system design, implementation, interoperability, standards and usability, in addition to a sufficient knowledge of medicine and healthcare, is critical in obtaining digital-health capabilities which will improve population health and access to healthcare delivery. It is equally crucial that healthcare professionals possess adequate knowledge of and skills in health informatics to ensure the seamless use of the new systems. It is therefore essential to provide health-informatics education to users, developers, and researchers. This conference has solicited contributions concerning new approaches in digital health, and the outcomes of health informatics research, development, and education, to support evaluations of the extent to which the consequences of the shortages in the healthcare workforce can be compensated for in the near future.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially machine learning, is increasingly applied in healthcare. The large number of AI-related contributions in this publication reflects the prevalence of AI in medicine and healthcare. Natural language processing and generation, decision support and image analysis are important areas in medicine which can make use of AI methods, but it is crucial that all the systems developed are thoroughly tested. The doctor or nurse will make a decision based on the system’s advice, it is therefore vital that systems based on machine learning provide explainable artificial intelligence, or xAI, to enable the user to assess the accuracy of the advice.

These proceedings demonstrate the breadth of health informatics. There are contributions covering topics such as databases, user-centred design, information systems, usability, privacy, security, secondary use of health data, data integration, interoperability, and standardisation, but also clinical guidelines, AI and xAI, decision support, pattern recognition, medical imaging, natural language processing, deep learning, doctor-chatbot interaction, health literacy, and education, to name but a few.

The Proceedings are published by IOS Press as an e-book in the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics (HTI). Volumes in this series are submitted (for evaluation) for indexing by MEDLINE/PubMed; Web of Science: Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Science (CPCI-S) and Book Citation Index – Science (BKCI-S); Google Scholar; Scopus, and EMCare.

The Editors

John Mantas, Arie Hasman, George Demiris, Kaija Saranto, Michael Marschollek, Theodoros Arvanitis, Ivana Ognjanović, Arriel Benis, Parisis Gallos, Emmanouil Zoulias and Elisavet Andrikopoulou.

Athens, 10.07.2024