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.

Session A1: Hospital Information Systems

Session A2: Clinical Laboratory Systems
Session A3: Applications in Obstetrics and Perinatal Medicine
Session A4: Signal Analysis
Session A5: General Practice/Ambulatory Care
Session A6: Nursing Applications
Session A7: Drug Information Systems
Session A8: Administrative and Financial Applications
Session A9: Patient Monitoring/Intensive Care
Session B1: Medical Methodology
Session B2: Evaluation of Health Care
Session B3: Medical Research
Session B4: Epidemiology
Session C1: Educational Needs and Concepts
Session C2: Privacy, Confidentiality and Social Aspects
Session C3: Community Health Care
Session D1: New Technology
Session D2: Networks Distributed Systems and Data Bases
Session D3: Free Text Processing
Session D4: Models of Health Care
KEYNOTE ADDRESSES
AUTHOR INDEX.