The symposium and panel discussion raise the fundamental theorum of medical informatics. The keynote speaker and panelists discuss how information is used, organized and retrieved with emerging technology in health-care, research and education. The symposium presents how the informatics approach carries an explicit focus on the interaction between the person and the machine as partners, which contrasts earlier technology approaches that focused primarily on the machine, and secondarily on the user. From the Series:The 2000 Biomedical and Health Informatics Symposium: A Vision for Informatics