Designing for the Next 50 Years: An MIE 2026 Retrospective

This year’s Medical Informatics Europe conference in Genoa marked the event’s 50th anniversary. As a returning attendee — having first participated in Glasgow — I came with more context and sharper questions. The opening ceremony included an unusual gesture: EFMI President Lars Lindskold invited attendees to sign a physical registry, to be opened at the centennial event 50 years from now.

Key Themes

Interoperability as Foundation: Having spent the year between conferences studying OpenEHR, HL7, FHIR, and SNOMED-CT, the Genoa sessions landed differently. The gap between standards on paper and systems in production remains the central challenge in health informatics.

Telemedicine and Patient-Reported Outcomes: Professor Silvana Quaglini’s opening keynote examined the state of telemonitoring and what it takes to integrate disparate platforms into coherent health information systems. Her framing of PROMs and PREMs — Patient-Reported Outcome and Experience Measures — as first-class data, not afterthoughts, was a useful recalibration.

Long-Term Architecture: Lars Lindskold’s closing keynote challenged attendees to evaluate every architectural decision against a 50-year horizon. That standard cuts through a lot of short-term reasoning.

Applying It

The Porto Antico dockyard setting was a fitting backdrop for thinking about containerization — not just the shipping kind. The case for Docker in software verification pipelines becomes clearer when you see the same interoperability problem solved in physical logistics.

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Designing for the Next 50 Years: An MIE 2026 Retrospective