The day has not arrived when pathology departments freely distribute their collected anatomic and clinical data for research purposes. Nonetheless, several valuable public domain data sets are currently available, from the U.S. Government. Two public data sets of special interest to pathologists are the SEER (the U.S. National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program) public use data files, and the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) mortality files. The SEER files contain about 4 million de-identified cancer records, dating from 1973. The CDC mortality files contain approximately 85 million de-identified death records, dating from 1968. This editorial briefly describes both data sources, how they can be obtained, and how they may be used for pathology research.

The 13 ^th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (Medinfo) was held in 2010 between 12 and 15 September in Cape Town, South Africa. This triennial international gathering is the official conference of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and brings together leading health informatics leaders, scientists, clinicians, researchers, vendors, developers and government and health care planners from around the globe. The conference attracted 905 submissions and resulted in a program that included 260 oral presentations, 349 posters presentations and 21 scientific demonstrations representing contributions from 58 countries. The Medinfo program covered all aspects of health informatics from traditional areas, such as hospital information systems, patient registries, nursing informatics, data integration, standards, interoperability issues and decision support, to innovative topics, such as translational bioinformatics, text mining, intelligent data analysis, emerging technologies, quality, social networking, workflow and organizational issues. The outgoing President of the IMIA, Professor Reinhold Haux, presented on health informatics challenges into the future, reinforcing that today and in the future, health care has to be considered as part of a continuous and coordinated life-time journey and not just as episodes of disease. Medical informatics has a key role to play in this paradigm shift. The new IMIA President, Professor Antoine Geissbuhler, was announced at the closing ceremony. The next Medinfo congress will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2013.