'New Technologies in Hospital Information Systems' is launched by the European Telematics Applications Project 'Healthcare Advanced Networked System Architecture' (HANSA) with support of the GMDS WG Hospital Information Systems and the GMDS FA Medical Informatics. It contains 28 high quality papers dealing with architectural concepts, models and developments for hospital information systems. The book has been organized in seven sections: Reference Architectures, Modelling and Applications, The Distributed Healthcare Environment, Intranet Solutions, Object Orientation, Networked Solutions and Standards and Applications. The HANSA project is based upon the European Pre-standard for Healthcare Information System Architecture which has been drawn up by CEN/TC 251 PT01-13. The editors felt that this standard will have a major impact on future developments for hospital information systems. Therefore the standard is completely included as an appendix.

Current demographic, economic and social conditions which developed countries are faced with require a paradigm change for delivering high quality and efficient health services. In that context, healthcare systems have to turn from organization-centered to process-oriented and finally towards individualized patient care, also called personal care, based on ehealth platform services. Interoperability requirements for ubiquitous personalized health services reach beyond current concepts of health information integration among professional stakeholders and related Electronic Patient Records.Future personal health platforms particularly have to maintain semantic interoperability among systems using different modalities and technologies, different knowledge representation and domain experts' languages as well as different coding schemes and terminologies to include home care, as well as personal and mobile systems. This development is not restricted to regions or countries, but appears globally, requiring a comprehensive international collaboration. This publication within the series "Studies in Health Technology and Informatics" presents papers from leading international experts representing all domains involved in ehealth.