Welcome to the 26th annual congress of the Swiss Society for Medical Informatics

Abstract

Our society has chosen Integrated Care as main topic for the conference. Not only health managers and politicians are talking about integrated care as one of the most important scenarios in healthcare for the very near future. In the last decade, information officers invested most of their time in completing homework within their institutions. Clinical information systems were implemented, processes have been redesigned, clinical decision support has been implemented, and steps toward automatisation and personalisaton have been made. However, many of these efforts never crossed the borders of a hospital or a private practice. In the next decade, building transition of information will be much more in the forefront of our daily work than it is today. So that we can profit most from current experiences, this congress will show some existing pilot systems dealing with information transfer across institutions, cantons or even the country. We should learn as much as we can from pioneering groups and from practice examples, as Switzerland is lagging behind many other countries in terms of eHealth. Hopefully, the boards of directors in Swiss hospitals will recognise the signs of the times, the potential lying in information technologies, and will support the efforts made by information managers. A second important theme of this congress covers the evidence base behind our daily work. Not only do we know many things about how to design and implement information technologies, but we also have to learn from our failures. Contributions by international and national speakers will focus on how to perform – and how not to perform – in our area of interest. Not surprisingly, errors occur most where we don’t tailor our information systems to information needs and work processes, and also where we make too-rigid rules. One area of concern in this context – as shown during the congress – is data protection. The interpretation of our data protection laws, which resemble a pendulum swinging from the paper period when there was no real data protection to a period where data protection finally decides the possibilities in work with information technologies, determines many ICT implementations in these days. And they provoke e-iatrogenesis! In coexistence with the main topic of integrated care, all stakeholders should engage in working together and finding common, consensual solutions for the best of our healthcare systems! I finally wish you two intensive, vivid, interesting and communication-full medical informatics days!