New Year Wishes – the medical informatics view

Abstract

The past few months, which will go down in the history books as the “Corona Year”, have demanded a lot of commitment, a lot of flexibility, a lot of stamina and sometimes also a lot of innovation from all of us. But they have also made us aware of what we have given too little weight to or neglected in the past: an ideal basis for listing wishes. Stephan Siegrist from the think tank W.I.R.E is a little more severe in his assessment of contemporary IT when he says: “Digitalisation has disappointed. This was foreseeable even before Corona, but the pandemic has revealed it even more clearly” [1]. Seen in this light, there is undoubtedly a need for action. In order to cope with the exceptional pandemic situation, many healthcare workers have already performed extraordinarily well under difficult conditions, and they will continue to do so. Complicating the effort in caring for the numerous and seriously ill patients, organisational adjustments were necessary in many places. Medical informatics specialists and IT staff have done their utmost to redefine and map processes, to relieve clinicians of administrative work as much as possible, through automation and innovation, and – especially in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic – to bring a certain stability to the uncertainty through information processing and transparency. On behalf of our Society, I would like to express our sincere thanks to all of them. Even if we can be proud of particularly quick and perhaps particularly innovative or efficient solutions, there are still some things that need to be addressed and put on a wish list (with a positive connotation) or to-do list (with an honest connotation) for the year that has just begun.