Greetings! On behalf of the 13th IEEE International Conference on e-Health Networking, Application & Services (Healthcom2011) Organizing Committee, I would like to welcome you to Columbia, Missouri, USA - the heartland of America and home of the University of Missouri.

The conference has been held successfully in Sydney, Australia (1999 and 2000), L'Aquila, Italy (2001), Nancy, France (2002), Santa Monica, USA (2003), Odawara, Japan (2004), Busan, South Korea (2005), New Delhi, India (2006), Taipei, Taiwan (2007), Singapore (2008), Sydney, Australia (2009), and Lyon, France (2010). Since 1999 the conference has provided a unique platform that brings together interested parties from around the world working in various health care fields to exchange ideas and discuss innovative and emerging solutions.

The main theme of HealthCom 2011 is "technology-enabled personalized medicine" to provide preventive and therapeutic care that is optimized for individual patient subpopulations. This year's proceedings include 77 papers, of which 27 full papers (6-8 pages) are scheduled for oral presentation (39.13% acceptance rate) and 50 short papers (4-page), which are for poster exhibitions (with flash oral presentations). Contributors to this year's proceedings include 293 authors from 25 countries. Accepted papers will address topics in new theoretical and practical development of mHealth and eHealth. These topics include: the advancement of m-Health (mobile device technologies, networking, communications), telemedicine (virtual tele-health, robotic surgeries), e-Health (electronic health records, telemedicine, consumer health informatics), home and aging (eldercare, rehabilitation) and decision support (diagnosis classification, disease management). I would like to extend a special thanks to the program co-chairs, Drs. George Demiris and Kendal Ho; publication chair, Dr. Adrian Barb; technical program committee members; and conference coordinator, Ms. Jill McIntosh, for their hard work ensuring the quality of the program and the arrangement of the conference activities.

I hope you enjoy your stay in Columbia, Missouri, and take advantage of the opportunities for interaction with colleagues in the HealthCom fields.

Chi-Ren Shyu
General Chair of IEEE HealthCom 2011
University of Missouri Informatics Institute