Honorary Fellows of the European Federation for Medical Informatics

Abstract

Since its creation in 1976, the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) has elected twenty nine “Honorary Fellows”, a highly selected group of European scientists, experts, managers, teachers and leaders recognized by their peers for their important contribution to the field of health informatics. They can be considered as“pioneers” in research, education and services to the community. They opened a new world by using computerized information systems and by developing digitized medicine. They were nominated by all European scientific societies of Medical Informatics (now 32). EFMI is IMIA Europe (national scientific societies members of the International Medical Informatics Association in the European Region). Izet Masic wrote a monograph describing the role and the career of all “EFMI Honorary Fellows” elected from 1985 to 2016, with their portraits and their specific role in the development and organization of Medical informatics. He took into account their environment by writing an introduction on the history of EFMI, its role and objectives, as well as its specific meetings: MIE congresses, Medical Informatics in Europe and STCs, Special Topic Conferences. He described also EFMI Working groups activities in many fields: education, electronic health records, primary health care informatics, nursing informatics, security, safety and ethics, minimum basic data sets for casemix, resources management and outcomes of care, open source software, natural language understanding,... Informatics is a term that has been introduced by François Grémy from France and Peter Leo Reichertz from Germany before being accepted all over the world. Their contribution to the education and to the development of European Research programs supported by the European Commission in Medical informatics has been essential. Their role in the creation of hospital information systems as well as in the building of an infrastructure for scientific cooperation in the field in Europe should be underlined. Other names like those of John Anderson, Barry Barber, Hans Peterson, Jean-Raoul Scherrer cannot be forgotten, as well as those of all other “Honorary Fellows” that make the core of this book... Brussels, May 25th, 2017 Prof Francis H. Roger France, MD, PhD University of Louvain, Brussels, Belgium