Abstract
The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a non-governmental, non-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing. It was established in 1960 as a result of the first World Computer Congress held in Paris in 1959.
IFIP has developed its activities through so-called technical committees (TC). The IFIP-TC4 was founded by Frangois Gremy, from France, in 1967.
The first interactions of Czechoslovakia with the field of medical informatics started at this time. In the late sixties, the Medical Cybernetics Unit was established at the Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion in Prague.
One of the three groups of the Medical Cybernetics Unit was focused on research on computer-supported medical decision making, pattern recognition, and health services evaluation. This group organized the first conference Decision processes in clinical medicine in Prague in 1972.
This group's research progress was to the great merit of Albert Perez, member of IFIP, who was a leader of the Czech school of information theory. Albert Perez endorsed two of his Ph.D. students to be representatives to the IFIP-TC4 on medical informatics topics.
The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) grew out of the former TC 4 of the IFIP in 1979. Francois Gremy and Peter Reichertz from Germany deserve credit for the spread of the term medical informatics all over the world.