Our history and objectives

The Belgian Society for Medical Informatics ("MIM") was established in 1974 to promote and develop medical information science and technology in Belgium. It is a national bilingual (French and Dutch) society consisting of about 300 members, all involved or interested in the use of computers and telematics in the health-care environment. The administrative board includes 15 members (physicians, engineers and computers specialists) from academic institutions, hospitals, computers and the software industry.

The MIM is a scientific society. Its major activities focus on improving communication among researchers and developers in the field of medical computing and telematics. It is also the place of choice where problems related to the role of medical informatics in society and its ethical aspects are discussed.

International related medical informatics societies:

• The MIM is the Belgian member of EFMI (European Federation for Medical Informatics) and of IMIA (International Medical Informatics Association). As such, the MIM is involved in the setting up of whose congresses, scientific events and publications.
• The MIM cooperates closely with the Dutch (VMBI), French (AIM) and Swiss (SSIM) medical informatics societies to organize annual scientific meetings: the « Medisch Informatica Congres » (MIC) and the « Journées Francophones d’Informatique Médicale » (JFIM).

Facing the growing importance of medical informatics in the health domain and the increasing numbers of societies dealing with various aspects of Medical Informatics development, the MIM has to regularly adapt its development strategy and its activities to this evolving context.

The MIM is a non-profit association, an "ASBL-VZW" according to the Belgian law. Resources are based on the participation of volunteers, on yearly membership fees, and sometimes on incomes from the organization of congresses or from studies on request of the public administration. There are no commercial advertisements.

All the members and interested persons are kindly asked to help us in these tasks.