The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) is a regional coordinating body for the National Informatics Societies of Europe. EFMI has organized a number of congresses. The Congresses in Cambridge 1978, Berlin 1979, Toulouse 1981, Dublin 1982 and Brussels 1984 were all successful in providing the wide variety of people in the caring and specialists in the computing profession with up-to-date inform ation from the expanding multidisciplinary field of medical inform atics. We hope that the sixth European Congress on Medical Informatics, MIE-85 in Helsinki will be equally successful. You have in your hand the pre-publication of papers to be presented at MIE-85 as well as the short abstracts of the posters. The proceed ings enable the participants to follow work presented at sessions that they are unable to attend. It also provides a permanent record with relevant bibliography for workers in the field of medical com puting. All the papers have been refereed and the referees' suggest ions incorporated in the final text. Rapid publication, using camera ready paper, reduces the time required for editing and indexing. The editorial board has worked hard to improve the standard of the communications and to reduce the number of errors. Very few papers did not arrive in time to be included in the proceedings: these are marked with * in the table of contents."

The European Federation for Medical Informatics is a regional coordinat- ing body. The Congress in Dublin. MIE 82. from 21st to 25th March 1982. is the fourth in the series following MIE 78 in Cambridge. MIE 79 in Berlin. There was a break in 1980 for the World Congress - MEDINFO 8- in Tokyo. This was followed by MIE 81 in Toulouse. The rationale behind 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 Medical Informatics in health care delivery. All the caring professions are involved. doctors. scientists. nurses. pharma- cists. paramedical staff. administrators. health care planners. commu- nity physicj-US'I,!Dedical educationalists. epidemiologists. statisti- cians. o. pe-~atio'ns 'analysts. together with specialists from the comput- ing profession dealin~ with systems analysis. hardware. software. lan- guages. data ba,s~s and marketing of systems. The pre-publi~~tion of'conference proceedings from a multi-stream con- ference is partic~l~t~y valuable in a rapidly expanding multidisciplin- ary field su~h as'M~dical Informatics. It enables participants to fol- low work presented at sessions that they are unable to attend. More im- portantly. is also provides a permanent record with relevant bibliogra- phy for other workers to assess which groups are active and in which areas. All the papers have been refereed and the referees' suggestions incorporated in the final texts. Rapid publication. using camera-ready copy. reduces the time available for editing and indexing.