The European Federation for Medical Informatics has established itself as a regional body coordinating activity in medical informatics. The Congress in Toulouse, MIE-81, from 9 - 13 March 1981, is the third congress in the ser ies following MIE-78 in Cambr idge, and MIB-79 in Berlin with a gap during 1980 for the world congress MEDINFO-80 in Tokyo. The rationale behind all these congresses is the scientific need to share results and ideas and the educational need to train a wide variety of professional staff in the potential of health care and medical informatics. All the caring professions are involved, doctors, scientists, nurses, para-medical staff, administrators, health care planners, community physicians, epidemiologists, statisticians, operations analysts together with specialists from the computing profession dealing with system analysis, hardware, software, languages, data-bases and the marketing of systems. Medical Informatics is a very wide subject with ramifications throughout the health care and preventive services; it offers a key to the monitoring and improvement of patient care and to the provision of a healthier environment. The collection and evaluation of relevant data improves our understanding of the ways in which health care is provided while the availability of cheaper computer hardware and more versatile software enables us to design and implement more revealing and intelligent medical systems. Even though typical systems take a substantial amount of time to design, implement and evaluate, there is the continuing need for informaticians to assess the current state of developmen.

The HIB 79 Congress is the second one organized by the European Federation for l-iedical Informatics (EFMI). The host society is the "Deutsche Gesellschaft fur l-ledizinische Dokurnentation, Informatik und Statistik (GMDS) who are holding their 24th annual meeting at this time. The program of MIB 79 covers every aspect of the application of information science to medicine and public health, and as such respresents the state of the art. Medical Informatics (M. I. ) is now at a turning pOint. To date, despite the efforts made by specialists in many countries, the balance sheet of M. I. remains rather poor. One of the reasons for this situation is the fact that the computers of yesterday were the prerogative of an elite of users. They were expensive, difficult to use, remot. e from the users, and mainly in the hands of a sacerdotal caste of data processing speciali sts * In the future, data processing facilities will be cheap, easy to handle, and immediately accessible. Data processing will have a chance of becoming truly democratic thanks to two important and complementary trends in computer technology: 1. a network due to computer communication partnership; 2. miniaturization due to the dramatic expansion of micro-processor and computer technology. IV The combination of these two main hardware achievements for which some neologisms have been invented - "compunication" \ in the USA and "telEnnatique" in France - will lead to a completely new way of processing data which may be called "distributed informatics.