This book accompanies the third annual ICMCC Event. In the 12 months since our previous conference we established the goals of the ICMCC Foundation.

To become the leading source for citizen/patient-related information using the latest medical and care compunetics is the first of these goals. ICMCC has been one of the first organizations recognizing the possible thread to patient safety of the information available on the internet.

ICMCC also recognizes the problems of professionals to find information on the latest developments in medical and care compunetics in a structured way.

These two aspects form the basis for becoming the leading Knowledge Centre on medicine and care.

To realize this goal our third annual event covers aspects concerning:

• Information supply to patient and professional

• Electronic health records, its standards, its social implications

• New developments in medical & care compunetics.

Our third goal is to serve as the central meeting place for exchanging information on all aspects related to medical and care compunetics and for all those concerned. We are therefore pleased to be a platform once again for a number of European Commission (IST) funded projects.

And we are proud to be the platform for the EFMI (European Federation for Medical Informatics) Working Groups “Electronic Health Records”, “Security, Safety and Ethics” and “Cards” and we would like to thank Dr. Bernd Blobel and Dr. Peter Pharow for their work to organise this session.

On September 29, 2005 our co-founder Prof. Swamy Laxminarayan passed away. We will be forever in his debt for his believe in our organisation and goals and his relentless support. To honour the memory of one of the greatest minds in biomedicine and biotechnology of the twentieth century ICMCC will this year initiate an annual Swamy Laxminarayan lecture.

On behalf of the ICMCC Foundation board we wish to thank the IFMBE and the WABT-ICET-UNESCO for accepting us as members and for their support for this conference. We are equally grateful for the endorsement by the IEEE-SSIT.

Finally we would like to thank all the authors who have contributed to making the third ICMCC Event into an interesting and challenging conference.

Lodewijk Bos, Laura Roa, Brian O'Connell, Kanagasingam Yogesan, Andy Marsh, Bernd Blobel