- patient well-being, optimatl decision making

- growing use of computers in health-care settings

- interest in learning more, but difficult

- book to provide a conceptual framework for learning about computer applications in medical care

- medical informatics, including computer applications, identified as an area in which new educational opportunities needed to be developed so that physicians would be better prepared for the practice of medicine (Assoc. of American Medical Colleges 1984)

- the goal of integrating medicine and computer science is to provide a mechanism for increasing the sophistication of health professionals so they know and understand the available resources, and

- they should be familiar with medical computing’s success and failures, its research frontiers and its limitations, so they can avoid repeating mistakes of the past

- well-trained individuals to teach students, and design, develop, select, manage future medical-computing systems