For the first time in history, the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) held the joint “E-Health” Symposium as part of “Treat IT” stream of the IFIP World Congress 2010 at Brisbane, Australia during September 22–23, 2010. IMIA is an independent organization established under Swiss law in 1989. The organization originated in 1967 from Technical Committee 4 of IFIP that is a n- governmental, non-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing. It was established in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO following the First World Computer Congress held in Paris in 1959. Today, IFIP has several types of members and maintains friendly connections to specialized agencies of the UN system and non-governmental organizations. Technical work, which is the heart of IFIP's activity, is managed by a series of Technical Committees. Due to strong needs for promoting informatics in healthcare and the rapid progress of information and communication technology, IMIA President Reinhold Haux p- posed to strengthen the collaboration with IFIP. The IMIA General Assembly (GA) approved the move and an IMIA Vice President (VP) for special services (Hiroshi Takeda) was assigned as a liaison to IFIP at Brisbane during MEDINFO2007 where th the 40 birthday of IMIA was celebrated.
