definition for: #IMIALAC

The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) has a Federation of countries called IMIA-LAC since 1983. The regional activities of IMIA-LAC have been scarce, and at the beginning of the current IMIA-LAC Board in 2006 it only had four Country societies in it: Brazil, Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay.

MIA-LAC goals In order to develop health informatics within the region and strengthen regional ties, the current IMIA-LAC Board proposed two simple goals: 1. Strengthen the network of Health Informatics Societies in Latin America and the Caribbean The countries from LAC are currently underrepresented in IMIA-LAC and in IMIA. There are other parallel ways of developing health informatics in a country, such as creating academic programs in Universities, but we believe that there is a need for a country coordination by a national health informatics society, that should be multidisciplinary and representative within the country and abroad, and have tight links with the Academia and Government in order to succeed in producing changes. 2. Define the main topics to promote and the groups in charge of doing it The main topics selected were: a. Health informatics education (for both users and experts). b. Health information systems (and within this topic, adoption of standards, legal and regulatory bodies for each country, and organizational change). Since IMIA-LAC did not want to exclude other interests within the broad discipline of health informatics, if there were more topics of interest for participants, other groups would be created.