Education and Research in Health Informatics at the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille, Laboratory for Education and Research in Medical Information Processing (LERTIM).

Our group is approximately 18 strong, including 2 secretaries and 5 PhD students. Some of the LERTIM members (6 in all) have two sets of responsibilities, because of the way French medical schools and teaching hospitals are organized: they have teaching and research activities both in the Faculty of Medicine and the teaching hospital. Their faculty activities deal with research on medical informatics topics and fundamental aspects, and their hospital activities with practical ones. Teaching activities proceed within the framework of compulsory studies and cover University degrees within the teaching hospital and continuing education facilities. Research activities in the Faculty of Medicine, are concerned with the application of new information and communication technologies (decision support systems, information indexing and retrieval, modelling and access to knowledge bases, health information systems etc.).The main research goal in the teaching hospital is clinical research in various medical fields. We shall describe the teaching curriculum and the main research aspects our laboratory is involved in. Most of these descriptions are already available (in French) on our web site http:// cybertim.timone.univ-mrs.fr/cybertim/.