Book excerpt: This volume seeks to reflect the state of the art on medical informatics. It presents ideas that will guide the process of medical informatics. Topics in the book include: information systems in health care and medicine; telemedicine and telematics; security; biomedical processing, data mining and knowledge discovery; training and education; Internet/intranet; resources management; intelligent medical systems; health guidelines and protocols; electronic patient encounter, card technology, electronic data interchange; terminology; nursing informatics.