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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Yearb Med Inform 2021; 30(01): 001
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1726523
President's Statement

Leading IMIA through a Global Pandemic

Sabine Koch
1   Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
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When taking on the presidency of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) in 2019, my greatest wish was to give not least the young generation of biomedical and health informaticians the possibility to collaborate, build networks, exchange ideas, and to provide a platform to perform new activities and expand them. I was thrilled about the Student and Emerging Professionals Special Interest Group that was formed at Medinfo 2019 in Lyon and hoped for cross fertilization with the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (“The Academy” for short), consisting of elected fellows with long standing academic achievements in the field.

What I certainly did not have in mind was the complete absence of physical meetings during my presidency. But new circumstances create new opportunities. Many of the core IMIA activities happen in the IMIA Working Groups (WGs) and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that immediately switched their work towards the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the leadership of the Vice President for WG/SIG Luis Fernandez-Luque, the WG/SIG chairs prepared a call for action on Evidence-Based Health Informatics as the Foundation for the COVID-19 Response [[1]]. In this paper, thirteen out of twenty-six WGs and SIGs reported their efforts in helping to build an evidence-based response to this crisis; and more papers responding to this call for action are to come. Another COVID-19 related IMIA activity took place on December 16, 2020, when representatives of IMIA and IMIAs Academy held an open dialogue with the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, about the opportunities and challenges of digital health during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The dialogue attracted 200 participants from different civil society organizations and its outcomes have been published in the IMIA Yearbook [[2]], and are further incorporated into the new collaboration plan between IMIA and WHO.



Publication History

Article published online:
03 September 2021

© 2021. IMIA and Thieme. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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  • References

  • 1 Fernandez-Luque L, Kushniruk AW, Georgiou A, Basu A, Petersen C, Ronquillo C. et al. Evidence-Based Health Informatics as the Foundation for the COVID-19 Response: A Joint Call for Action. Methods Inf Med 2021 May 11. . Epub ahead of print
    Thieme ConnectPubMed
  • 2 Koch S, Hersh WR, Bellazzi R, Leong TY, Yedaly M, Al-Shorbaji N. Digital Health during COVID-19: Informatics Dialogue with the World Health Organization. Yearb Med Inform 2021 Apr 21. . Epub ahead of print
    Thieme ConnectPubMed
  • 3 IMIA Strategic Plan - Executive Summary, 2017 [cited 2021 June 27]. Available from: https://imia-medinfo.org/wp/imia-strategic-plan/
    PubMed