Contribution of EFMI to development of medical informatics. European Federation for Medical Informatics.

The European Federation for Medical Informatics has been established in 1976. At the MIE 96 it has celebrated the 20th anniversary of its existence. During these 20 years the number of number of national societies who became a member has been increased from 10 to 26 and nowadays is 29 not mentioning 2-3 applicants. The objectives of EFMI are: a) to advance international co-operation and dissemination of information, b) to promote research and development, c) to promote high standards in the application, d) to encourage high standards in education in this field. The achieve these goals EFMI organizes yearly European Congresses the MIE-s. Through its working groups contributes very well to the scientific development of medical informatics. The Working Group Chairmen regularly organizes tutorials workshops and many of them participate in teaching medical informatics in their homeland as well as on international courses. EFMI publishes scientific papers from its congresses in the Medical Informatics and in the International Journal of Medical Informatics. The most important meeting, however is the regular Council Meeting--twice a year--where council members can exchange opinions, have opportunity to discuss problems of medical informatics and last but not lease recently medical Inform-ETHICS. This Council is operating as a HUMAN-NET counterbalancing the dysinformations coming from the Internet.