We are very honored to invite you to participate at the International Conference on e-Health and Bioengineering, EHB 2011, which will take place in ROMANIA, in the city of Iaşi.

The main objective of this third conference, organized by the ‘Gr.T. Popa’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Iaşi and the Romanian Society of Medical Bioengineering, under the aegis of IEEE Romania and IEEE-EMB Romania, is dedicated to the e-health and medical bioengineering in general. Its goals are to promote concepts and advanced hardware and software technologies in the emerging domains of e-health, medical devices and instrumentation, biosignal and image processing, biomechanics, biomaterials, biotechnologies, healthcare management, also for some younger disciplines like bioinformatics, systems biology or virtual physiological human.

Another objective is to strengthen the interdisciplinary synergy between medical and technical researchers and practitioners, within the generous framework of medical bioengineering, in order to establish and promote advanced scientific concepts, methods and technologies for medical services and healthcare in Romania and enlarged Europe. In this respect, a special attention will be granted in the next years to targeting research to the real needs of patients of the 3-rd millennium, through different national and international projects and partnerships.

Today medicine cannot be thought and practiced without the help of Information Technology and Telecommunications (IT&C) and computers are used more and more together with medical equipment and physicians' working set. In fact, all the domains of clinical and experimental medicine have been developed with the direct help of IT&C.
Thus, the future big challenge for health care domain will be the creation of a National Health Information Infrastructure, which will link all practices and practitioners in the country and must be a permanent concern at the highest level of governmental institutions.

Telemedicine and e-health in Romania and particularly in Iaşi exceeds the level of other more or less theoretical approaches and demonstrative issues. Its maturity was already proven by real time transmission and analysis of some vital biosignals of patients, within the Romanian Telemedical Regional Centre located at the Faculty of Medical Bioengineering of ‘Gr.T. Popa’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Iaşi, which was developed by a local team. So, our intention is to promote procedures for teleconsultation, telediagnosis and telemonitoring, providing an alternative to be employed in the healthcare system that could be made available "every time and anywhere" for those persons who need such a public service.
An extension of the previous system will be the deployment of an internet-based metropolitan network of hospital information systems (HIS) in Iaşi, that will allow extensive exchange of all kind of medical information between individual hospitals and clinics, teleconsultations by using mobile devices and also the access of patients to their own medical files.

Dear colleagues, you are all welcome to EHB 2011 !

Professor Hariton Costin
EHB 2011 General Chair