The International Conference on Information Communication Technologies in Health (ICICTH) was held for the seventh time from July 16 to July 18 on Samos Island in Greece. The board of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) took the opportunity and hold a meeting to discuss the future activities and strategies.

The conference is organized by the Research and Training Institute of the East Aegean, the Faculty of Nursing of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, the University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics & Technology, Austria, the Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the Bogazici University, Turkey and the Greek Health Informatics Association.

As the title of the conference already indicates the emphasis of the presentations is on the role of modern ICT technology on healthcare. This year the EFMI board held one of his board meetings during the conference. This opportunity was seized by the organizers of the conference to invite the board for contributions on the topic Continuity of Care.

Further topics discussed during the conference were: Electronic Health Records, Telemedicine and Mobile Health Applications, Evaluation of Information Systems, Information and Communication Technologies in Medical Education, Patient monitoring and Empowerment and intelligent Systems. Furthermore there was a special session on Certification and Security in Health-Related Web Applications, a session in which PhD candidates presented their work and a Lecture of ICT aspects of Health Tourism.

With an audience of about 70 people coming from fourteen different countries and all continents the conference has always been a place where the various contributions can be and are discussed in detail. The scientific quality of the papers is better every year and also this year I was impressed. I can advise all colleagues a visit to this conference in 2010.For 2009 proceedings are available.

It is planned to publish the presentions on the ICICTH-portal. More information at ICICTH Samos 2009