THE HISTORY OF IMIA AND EFMI AND MIE CONFERENCES 1978-2025
In the year 1967 François Grémy from France initiated the IFIP-TC4 on medical informatics (MI), a first forum which started to gather medical informaticians, especially those from Europe, and provoked organization of national MI societies (1). IFIP-TC4 followed this trend and evolved in 1979 from a IFIP Technical Commitee to the independent International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) (2–10). As IFIP itself was formed as a federation of national societies, thus reflecting the spirit of international cooperation of nations all over the world in education, science and culture, this federative thinking was transplanted also to its TC´s. Before that, in 1966, Francois Gremy initiated at the Faculté de Médicine of the Université de Paris, as professor of the Centre de calcul et de statistique, a curriculum on information processing by computers (1–3). In many countries, especially in Europe, from the end of sixties and the beginning of seventies of the past century, MI societies have been established. In the meantime, by establishing the TC4 on Medical Informatics (MI), Francois Grémy the first to add the adjective “medical” to the new term “informatics”*. Under his chairmanship several TC4 working groups were initiated, organizing meetings on information processing of medical records, education in MI, decision making and data protection. As a result of such development, in Europe representatives of ten national MI societies (their names contained various terms: “health informatics”, by William Abbot in UK, “medical informatics”, by Leo Peter Reichertz in Germany,, “data/information/processing in medicine”, etc.) met in Copenhagen in September 1976, under the auspices of the Office for Europe of the World Health Organization (WHO), founding the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) (1–5). Reichertz became the first EFMI president. The IFIP-TC4 followed this trend and evolved in 1979 from a special interest group of IFIP to the independent MI organization – IMIA .
Learn more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12212255/