ITIS'98 Conference - Invitation Letter

Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to participate in the first international Conference on the Telemedical Information Society (ITIS'98) to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 21st to 23rd, 1998.

Healthcare is a major candidate for improvement in any vision of the kinds of information highways and information societies that are now being visualised. The (interactive) communication between healthcare providers and their patients or other healthcare providers regardless of geographic distance, namely telemedicine, will become of central importance. The objective of any telemedical information society that can be imagined for the 21st century must be to provide a global uniform level of healthcare.

To facilitate the possibilities for any international collaborations, standardised approaches must be adopted. It is foreseen that the World Wide Web (WWW) will become the important communication medium of any future information society especially if this is combined with the concept of telemedicine which captures much of what is developing in terms of technology implementations.

The WWW could then be regarded as the (meta) operating system for the 21st century telemedical information society. If the development of such a society is to be on a global scale it should not be allowed to develop in an ad hoc manner. For this reason 20 building blocks resulting in 39 steps requiring multi-disciplinary collaborations have been identified.

ITIS'98 is the first international conference on the Telemedical Information Society and its associated concepts and technologies. It will be an opportunity for the international community to exchange ideas and develop a common vision for the future of World healthcare. Contribution to the progress of developing a global telemedical information society will include scientific papers demonstrations, forums and opinion/future vision papers. The organising committee have been working to make ITIS a truly memorable experience for all participants.

We sincerely hope that you will join us in making ITIS a success. We look forward to welcoming you to Amsterdam and to ITIS'98.

Sincerely,

A.Marsh

Conference Chair