Medinfo 2007 Congress: Building Sustainable Health Systems. Twelfth World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics 20-24 August 2007, Brisbane, Australia.

Many health systems across the world face the challenge of increasing demand and diminishing resources, which Hovenga, Coiera and Lovis (2007) contend are ultimately unsustainable. Over the next 20 years national health systems will have to treat proportionally more people, with more illnesses, higher expectations and more expensive technologies, but with the investment of relatively less money and fewer workers. Information, knowledge management and communication technologies are seen as crucial enablers of system change. To overcome the challenges we need to employ these resources to design and implement new sustainable systems. The conference theme focused on the following topics: Sustainable health systems Developing and developed national health challenges Knowledge informing safe and effective health care Social/political change (Medinfo 20071). Keynote speakers from around the world spoke about what makes a system sustainable and how knowledge and communications technologies are being employed in health care today. The conference comprised 172 sessions with over 300 papers on topics ranging across e-health systems