National EFMI Member Society: VMBI, Society for Healthcare Informatics
Short overview: The goal of the VMBI, the Dutch Society for Health Care Informatics, is to promote research, development, and applications in medicine and health care, and in the biological sciences.

The Society is a meeting place for people in medical informatics in the broadest sense, i.e. physicians, nurses, informaticians, physicists, hospital administrators, and health care managers.

All hospitals in The Netherlands have systems installed to support administration, communication and patiлnt care. In primary care, over 85% of GPs, all retail pharmacists, dentists, and the majority of physiotherapists have systems in use. An increasing numberv of systems are interconnected by EDI and networks. Development of computer-based patient records has much attention in R&D institutions. The Dutch professional medical societies play a major role in the promotion of information systems in healthcare. Most universities offer some training in medical informatics as part of the curriculum. This dynamic activity is a very healthy environment for the VMBI.

The activities of the VMBI include monthly meetings (lecturers, demonstrations) in Utrecht, in the center of the country, most of them in the late afternoon / early evening, annual two-day Conferences (called MIC, Medical Informatics Conference), together with the Belgian Society for Medical Informatics MIM, where about 400 people meet around lecturers, workshops and a large exhibition, an which is alternately held in The Netherlands and Belgium. The VMBI publishes a quarterly called I&Z (Informatie & Zorg, in english: Information & Care).

Over the past years, several IMIA Working Conferences have been organized in The Netherlands on subjects such as Telematics in Health Care, Hospital Information Systems, Electronic Patient Records in Medical Practice and Software Engineering in Health Care.

The VMBI developed a strategy to reinforce the relationships with professional medical societies and to increase its membership of practicing physicians. A working group has been established to develop concrete plans to widen the scope of the Society.