EFMI Working Groups WG EDUEducation in Health Informatics

Guidelines

Recommendations for BMHI education

The reference documents we use to design, review and accredit programmes and courses in Biomedical and Health Informatics.

IMIA Recommendations – second revision (2023)

The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) recommendations describe the knowledge and skills in BMHI that health professionals, health informaticians and IT specialists need. The second revision adds learning outcomes for new topics and is the main reference for accreditation.

Read the 2023 recommendations

How to use them

  • Map your course learning outcomes to the recommended domains, with the mapping template.
  • Pick the right depth for each audience (users, BMHI specialists, IT specialists).
  • Use the mapping as evidence for accreditation.

Mapping template

A spreadsheet to check how your programme covers the six IMIA domain areas. No expertise needed:

  1. Quick check (about 15 minutes): one row per course unit. For each of the six domains, read a short plain-language description with examples, then score the unit from 0 to 3 (not covered, mentioned, taught, taught and assessed).
  2. Coverage fills in by itself and shows each domain as covered, mentioned only or not covered.
  3. Expert mapping (optional): for accreditation evidence, map each learning outcome to an IMIA item, role (user, generalist, specialist) and depth.

Download the template (Excel, 23 KB) Quick check as CSV

Works in Excel, LibreOffice and Google Sheets. Licence CC BY 4.0. Version 1.1, October 2026. The domain descriptions are a WG EDU summary, not the official IMIA text. Suggestions to improve it are welcome through the WG.

All editions

  1. Bichel-Findlay J, Koch S, Mantas J, et al. Recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) on Education in Biomedical and Health Informatics: Second Revision. Int J Med Inform. 2023;170:104908. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2022.104908
  2. Mantas J, Ammenwerth E, Demiris G, et al. Recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) on Education in Biomedical and Health Informatics. First Revision. Methods Inf Med. 2010;49(2):105-120. PMID 20054502
  3. Recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) on education in health and medical informatics. Methods Inf Med. 2000;39(3):267-77. PMID 10992757

EFMI guidance

EFMI supports the IMIA recommendations and, through its Accreditation and Certification committee (AC2), promotes the accreditation of BMHI programmes and the certification of knowledge and skills in Europe.

TO VALIDATE List of EFMI position papers, accreditation criteria and AC2 documents to be supplied by the chairs.