The first official meeting of the Working Group was held on August 22, 1990 in conjunction with the Medical Informatics Europe Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. John Salley had been appointed Chair in 1989 and asked to put together a formal Working Group. Others who were at the Glasgow meeting included Lou Abbey, Tony Kiser, Werner Schneider, Veronica Wagner and Eric Spohn. John Salley served as chair for two more years, until 1992, and was then followed by Dr. Spohn who has served us well for the past three years. The first involvement of Working Group 11 in an IMIA meeting was in Geneva in 1992. Five presentations on dental informatics were made at that meeting. Working Group 11 continued to expand (although not exponentially) to the level of 15 scientific presentations, demonstrations, papers, and posters at the 8th MedInfo Conferece in Vancouver in July of 1995. A total of 27 persons signed up to be members of Working Group 11 at this meeting (see attached list). At this IMIA meeting, two co-chairs were elected. One of the co-chairs, John Eisner, attempted to create a broader base of membership using a WWW web site and this IMIAWG11 list. The other co-chair, Eva Piehslinger focused on making Dental Informatics Working Group 11 an even more visible part of MedInfo '98 in Seoul, Korea. Unfortunately there was only minimal dental representation at the Seoul meeting. In 1998 Dr. Wook-Sung Yoo volunteered to work with Dr. Eisner on the maintenance of the Working Group and web site. In 2000, Dr. Yoo took full responsibility and became a chair of the Working Group. Working Group 11 grew to 137 members including 50 active web members. In September, 2004, a joint business meeting of AMIA Dental Informatics WG and IMIA Dental Informatics WG was held at MedInfo 2004 in September 7 - 11 in San Francisco, CA, USA. At the meeting, four presentations were made with 16 participants. For detailed information of the meeting, please review Meeting Minutes. At the meeting, Gary Guest was announced to be a next chair of WG 11 from 2006.

For more information about this group, please see the Annual Reports: 1996 WG 11 Annual Report, 1997 WG 11 Annual Report, MedInfo 2004 WG 11 Meeting Report.

Author's Note: Any reader of this page who would like to add important historical details to this brief history is invited to do so by sending a note to the co-chairs using the envelope below.

Gary Guest, Chair

IMIA Working Group 11 (Dental Informatics)

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