Foreword

The aim of the IDEAS series of symposia and workshops is to address issues on the engineering and application of databases. An IDEAS symposium is scheduled annually and has been held since 1997 in North America, Europe and Asia. It has attracted participants from governmental and non-governmental exchange agencies, industry and academia to exchange ideas and share experience. IDEAS04-DH is the first meeting of the society in the People´s Republic of China and it has a very important theme ??? that of Medical Information Systems with an emphasis on Digital Hospital. Following the IDEAS tradition, these proceedings include quality papers presenting original ideas and new findings on applied technological and theoretical aspects of information technology in the area of human health care. The Program Committee and the referees have ensured this quality for the workshop through careful refereeing of the submitted abstracts. Just forty (representing 24 percent of the submissions) were selected for presentation at the workshop in English or Chinese with translation. The post workshop proceedings include the papers in English; some of the Chinese presentations appear in separately prepared proceedings distributed at the workshop.