Present

The society is in excellent condition, with sustained increases in membership each year with minimal advertising. There is an executive committee of twelve honorary officers, who divide up the work between them. The president is Professor Lord Robert Winston and the vice-presidents are Professor Derek Cramp (one of the original gang of four) and Dr Muir Gray. The annual general meeting is held each December, when elections are made to vacated position on the executive.

The new grade of fellowship continues to attract candidates of high calibre and there are now ten, with more in the pipeline. Applicants for the fellowship are to be encouraged and collective use of their expertise is made available in the new Fellows Forum 'British Medical Informatics Today', our newsletter, is published quarterly each year and our relationship with the journal 'Health Informatics' is now in its second year, as part of the membership services.

The IMIA annual Informatics Handbook is made available at low cost to our members on request. Three types of meetings are held each year. A workshop on postgraduate education in medical informatics takes place at the City University, London. A progress in informatics meeting is organised by the Manchester Group and sponsored by BMiS. One or more meetings on topics of interest to wider public are arranged in association with other groups or institutions.

We are recognised by the Inland Revenue Services as a learned society for the purposes of tax deductions for the subscriptions.

The web pages have been developed further to include a reading list with links to a bookseller, online banking to facilitate financial transfers, and informatics discussions on the new eGroups server.

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Future

Keep a eye on the web pages as they are often updated and new services added.

Make use of the Fellows Forum, they will answer members' questions.
Enquire about site visits that you think might be of interest and value
to you.

We propose to extend ebanking facilities for our members and are working on providing secure payments by credit card over the Internet.

Above all keep in touch with the Society. You can contact any member of the Executive with queries or suggestions.

We will continue to function essentially as a learned society with
membership open to all with an interest in medical (health) informatics.

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Past - the birth of BMiS

In the 1960s, the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) had two Professional Groups concerned respectively with Electronics in Biology & Medicine and Control in Biology & Medicine. The scope of these two Groups included material which would today fall within the remit of the British Medical Informatics Society (BMiS). Examples included electrophysiological signal processing and interpretation, and modelling in physiology and medicine.

In the 1970s, restructuring within the IEE meant that medical applications of measurement, modelling, control etc. were not deemed to form a part of the core activities of that institution and hence they were disbanded. The Institute of Measurement and Control (InstMC) saw the opportunity to establish a Panel concerned with Biomedical Measurement and Control, in essence filling the gap left by the IEE.

In the mid 1980s, the InstMC decided to launch a new journal entitled Biomedical Measurement Informatics and Control, with the aim to attract material that fell within the broad remit of the Biomedical Measurement and Control Panel. This journal was launched in 1986 and included material which would be clearly recognised as falling within the remit of medical informatics, for example with papers on modelling in medicine, expert systems and decision support systems.

The success of the Biomedical Medical Control Panel in terms of the conferences and symposia it organised, together with the interest engendered by the new journal, BMIC, encouraged the then Secretary (Chief Executive) of the InstMC, following extensive discussions with members of the Biomedical Panel, to establish a new Society focusing on this emerging and developing field of medical informatics. As a result, BMiS was born. Derek Cramp was the first Chairman, and the President of the Society was Sir Raymond Hoffenberg, at that time, President of the Royal College of Physicians.

The "gang of four" who had been members of the InstMC's Biomedical Measurement and Control Panel and who launched BMiS, were Derek Cramp, Mark Leaning, Derek Linkens and Ewart Carson. The first major conference organised by BMiS was "Medical Informatics 88 – and international conference on computers in clinical medicine". This took place at the University of Nottingham in September 1988, that conference being co-sponsored by the InstMC, the Institute of Medical Laboratory Sciences and the Royal College of Physicians.

The journal BMIC, having operated on a free standing basis from 1986 – 1988 was, with effect from 1999, incorporated into the Elsevier journal Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine. The agreement with Elsevier, which still stands, is that that journal should be a journal of BMiS which would be available at a discounted rate to BMiS members. To complement this learned society journal, the newsletter Biomedical Informatics Today (BMIT) was launched with Mark Leaning as its first editor.

For the first years of its existence, BMiS was based at the headquarters of the InstMC at 87 Gower Street. With regard to the two engineering institutions, the InstMC closed down its Biomedical Measurement and Control Panel at the end of the 1980s, having successfully given birth to BMiS. Meanwhile, at about the same time the IEE re-entered the field of medical applications, setting up a Professional Group on Biomedical Engineering, including within its scope areas such as biomedical signal processing and interpretation, and decision support systems in medicine.

The BMiS logo was devised (the components were building blocks, one
being a floppy disk, another had the reversed colour i underlining the
importance of information). The whole configuration was also intended to give the impression of movement.

Major national meetings were held each year in collaboration with bodies such as the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society of Medicine. Regional meetings were held in the West Midlands and Manchester.

A dial-up server with a members page was inaugurated in 1994 using a Windows-like technology, antedating the present web site which first appeared in 1997.

BMiS eGroups linked to the web site were opened to promote discussion amongst members.

The Health Informatics Journal was made available as part of the BMiS
annual subscription.

BMiS was recognised as a learned society and an allowable expense by Inland Revenue.

The Society shared an administrative home with the Society for the Internet in Medicine and the Oxford and Cambridge Institute for Health Informatics within the Institute of Health Sciences in Oxford between 1997 and 2000.