Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) conference was arranged in Gothenburg, Sweden in 24.-26.4.2018. At the same time Scandinavian eHealth event, VITALIS, took place in the same premises.
MIE covers a wide range of topics relating to medical informatics – from health literacy, different eHealth tools to data mining.
The first MIE was hosted in Cambridge, UK in 1978 and therefore MIE2018 marked the 40th anniversary for the conference. MIE2018 offered around 200 oral and 150 poster presentations. In addition, there were around 50 workshops, demonstrations and tutorials to attend to.
MIE2018 and Vitalis
Tuesday started early with a set of sessions and workshops. From HIBA research group Heidi Enwald was one of the organizers and presenters of the workshop “Re-defining eHealth Literacy for the 21st century. Discussing the evolution of the concept from different perspectives”.
In the workshop and, also afterwards, different definitions and measures of eHealth literacy were discussed. It was seen that we also need to get forward from discussing these issues; we need to identify what differentiates eHealth literacy from other health related literacy concepts, what are the future skills and abilities that relate to this concept and how should they be addressed. Heidi Enwald represents HIBA group in eHealth literacy network that continues discussion around the topic.
After Opening ceremony a Keynote speech was given by Patricia Flatley Brennan, the director of National Library of Medicine.
Keynote speech by Patricia Brennan
She spoke, among other things, about data-powered health that includes optimizing medication effectiveness, more efficient pathogen detection and targeted therapies. She mentioned that the nature of evidence in evidence-based medicine is also about to change. Furthermore, data does not take care of itself and therefore, e.g., data savvy librarians are needed.
As mentioned, MIE2018 provided many overlapping sessions to choose from and the decision was not always easy. Aging did not rise as a topic in many presentations, but there were some. For instance, Madeleine Blusi from Umeå University talked about aging in rural areas and their project that utilizes participatory design and attempts to create a service for including aged people into social activities they would otherwise no longer be able to join.
Madeleine Blusi from Umeå University
The VITALIS exhibition area was also available to visit by the participants of MIE2018.
Several kind of meetings were made possible by MIE2018 and VITALIS
The exhibition mostly contained booths of Swedish eHealth companies and made possible also the discussions between, e.g., researchers and advocates of industry.
The proceedings book of the conference is open access and can be found from the website: