Preparing for change: medical informatics international initiatives for health care and biomedical research.

The intention of this paper is to reflect on the development of medical informatics as a discipline and on the development of IMIA, the International Medical Informatics Association, as its international organization. IMIA is the international organization in health and biomedical informatics, which has the goal of stimulating and communicating high quality research, education and application, with medical informatics now being one of the central disciplines for achieving health for the people in societies worldwide. The need for new international initiatives is discussed and IMIA's recently approved Strategic Plan as well as its joint initiative with WHO are presented as examples.