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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Yearb Med Inform 2023; 32(01): 286-299
DOI: 10.1055/s-0043-1768716
History of Medical Informatics

Reflections Towards the Future of Medical Informatics

A Farewell Lecture after Almost Half a Century of Medical Informatics Activities
Reinhold Haux
Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics of TU Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Germany
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Summary

Objective: To provide guidance on the future development and role of medical informatics, or biomedical and health informatics, in form of reflections.

Method: To report on the author’s previous activities as a medical informatician, which spans almost half a century. It began in 1973 when he started to study medical informatics. In 1978, more than four decades ago, his professional work started. He retired at the end of summer semester 2021. This was the occasion to prepare this farewell lecture.

Results: In twenty reflections, thoughts are presented on professional careers (R1 – ‘places’), on medical informatics as discipline (R2 – ‘interdisciplinarity’, R3 – ‘focuses’, R4 – ‘affiliations’), on research (R5 – ‘duality’, R6 – ‘confluences’, R7 – ‘correlations’, R8 – ‘collaboration’), on education (R9 – ‘community’, R10 – ‘competencies’, R11 – ‘approaches’), on academic self-governance (R12 – ‘autonomy’), on engagement (R13 – ‘Sisyphos’, R14 – ‘professional societies’, R15 – ‘respect’, R16 – ‘tightrope walk’), and on good scientific practice (R17 – ‘time invariants’, R18 – ‘Zeitgeist’, R19 – ‘knowledge gain’, R20 – ‘exercising’).

Conclusions: It has been a pleasure for me to participate in medical informatics activities for almost fifty years. During that time, there have been significant advances, including in medicine and in informatics, and also in medical informatics itself. And now it is the turn of others. While keeping in mind that tradition is not preserving the ashes, but passing on the fire, this report with its reflections may be of some help.

Keywords

Medical Informatics - Biomedical and Health Informatics - Research - Eucation, Academic self-governance - Engagement - Good Scientific Practice


Publication History

Article published online:
06 July 2023

© 2023. 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/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
Rüdigerstraße 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

 

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