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.

Keynote Speeches

Session A1: Hospital Information Systems
Session A2: Departmental Patient Data Systems
Session A3: Decision Support and Expert Systems
Session A4: Medical Record Management and Classification Problems
Session A5: Application Development and Software Tools
Session A6: New Technology
Session B1: National Policy and Management
Session B2: Privacy and Data Protection
Session B3: Medical and Clinical Research and Epidemiology
Session B4: Ambulatory Care and General Practice
Session B5: General Practice Office Systems
Session B6: Mathematics, Statistics and Modelling
Session C1: Clinical Records and Data Bases
Session C2: Perinatal and Child Computing Applications
Session C3: Clinical Laboratory and Intensive Care Systems
Session C4: Education and Training
Session C5: Data Processing in Physiology
Session C6: Quality Assurance Applications
Session D: Nursing Applications
Keynote Speech
Posters.