The joint annual conference of the German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS) e.V. and the Technology and Methods Platform for Networked Medical Research (TMF) e.V. took place from September 26 to 30, 2021. Originally, this event was to be held in the presence in Kiel and was therefore under the direction of Prof. Dr. Björn Bergh (Conference President GMDS) and Prof. Dr. Michael Krawczak (Conference President TMF). Due to the coronavirus pandemic, however, the conference was held 100% virtually – as in 2020 – but this year with extended live parts from a conference studio on the premises of the Kiel Institute for Medical Statistics and Informatics.
The conference was officially opened on Monday morning by Prof. Bergh, Prof. Krawczak, and Prof. Dr. Alfred Winter (President GMDS). This was followed by a welcome address from Schleswig-Holstein’s Minister of Education, Karin Prien, and a speech by the Chairman of the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), Prof. Dr. Jens Scholz, who once again emphasized the importance of hospital digitalization.
In line with its motto “Digital Medicine – Discovering, Understanding, Healing”, the conference focused on the topics of digitalization, big data, artificial intelligence, and robotics. In the 23 lecture sessions and 15 workshops from the fields of medical informatics, biometrics/statistics, epidemiology, and public health, an intensive exchange took place between the more than 670 participants. A total of 104 submitted contributions from a wide range of topics were presented in this context; more than 50 exciting poster contributions from the various disciplines could be viewed in the ePoster section.
Current topics of particular interest were presented in the form of keynote speeches. First, Prof. Dr. Mirjam Kretzschmar (UMC Utrecht, NL) gave insights into the mathematical modeling of the coronavirus pandemic and presented the latest findings of various research groups. Jordan Everson Ph.D. (Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, USA) spoke about his own research successes in the field of “Evolving Strategies for Measuring Digital Health” and showed ways to improve hospital measurement systems. Tuesday continued with contributions from Professor Enrico Coiera (Macquarie University Sydney, AUS) on “Artificial Intelligence in Medicine – The Implementation Challenge” and Prof. Dr. Jan Baumbach (University of Hamburg) on “Privacy-preserving Systems in Medicine”, who presented a Federal Learning System. Friedelm Leverkus (Pfizer Germany) spoke on Wednesday morning on “Private-Public Cooperation in Research with Healthcare-Related Data”, addressing topics such as the missing data crisis during the coronavirus pandemic. In the evening, Professor Raymond Ng (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) surprised the audience with exciting findings on “Natural Language Understanding Tools for Clinical Documents”. Prof. Dr. Anne-Laure Boulesteix (LMU Munich) made the last contribution on Thursday morning under the title “A replication crisis in methodological computational research?”. In the accompanying live talks, the conference presidents, together with Prof. Winter, Prof. Schreiweis, and other guests, explored the content of the presentations in greater depth.
On Thursday afternoon, the conference came to a successful conclusion with a summary by Prof. Bergh, Prof. Krawczak, Prof. Schreiweis and Prof. Winter and a musical performance by the “GMDS Allstars”.
The organizers would like to thank all the experts for their great insights into their fields of research. The reference to current international health policy issues once again impressively underlined the relevance of GMDS and TMF topics for medicine in Germany.
