No quod sanctus instructior ius, et intellegam interesset duo. Vix cu nibh gubergren dissentias. His velit veniam habemus ne. No doctus neglegentur vituperatoribus est, qui ad ipsum oratio. Ei duo dicant facilisi, qui at harum democritum consetetur.
Prof. Dr. Dagmar Krefting - physicist and medical informatics specialist - is Director at the Institute of Medical Informatics at the University Medical Center Göttingen, one of the founding sites of the HiGHmed Consortium of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII).
Within HiGHmed, Dagmar Krefting not only leads the Use Case Cardiology, which aims to sustainably improve the care options and quality of life of more than three million patients with often chronic heart failure in Germany. She is also the lead project coordinator for the HiGHmeducation project, which develops and implements learning modules to ensure that the next generation of data scientists are highly qualified and trained to handle emerging innovations in medical data management.
She is also the lead coordinator of the Digital Hub CAEHR, which aims to improve health care for cardiovascular disease patients through streamlined health communication and timely delivery of relevant health information.
On the occasion of International Women's Day, we (the MII Social Media Team) talked to Prof. Dr. Dagmar Krefting about her professional ambitions, the HiGHmed project and women in medical informatics.
How did you get into medical informatics? In my doctoral thesis, I worked on nonlinear dynamics and ultrasonic cleaning tanks. For personal reasons, I moved to Berlin. There, a postdoctoral position on medical image processing was advertised at the Charité in the Institute of Medical Informatics. I applied for it because I had already done a lot of image processing, and I got the position. Shortly before my post-doctoral lecture qualification, I accepted a position at HTW Berlin in the Computer Science and Business program, where I taught core computer science for almost ten years, but continued to do research in medical informatics. In Göttingen, I first headed the institute on a provisional basis for two years and have now been director and chair for half a year.
What challenges do you think women face in medical informatics? Here, women are exposed to the same social mechanisms that still structurally disadvantage women in computer science in the 21st century: Attribution of gender-specific abilities already at an early age, which is often reinforced in the search for identity during puberty and still discourages many young women from taking an interest in computer science. Gender parity in medical informatics is far from being the norm in society. The newly created medical informatics professorships have been filled 85% by male colleagues. Women will therefore remain a small minority in academic leadership positions for at least another generation if we do not actively take countermeasures here.
What needs to change to get more women entering medical informatics professions? We need to actively encourage and promote girls and women in the field, create role models and opportunities for career changers, offer gender-appropriate professional training and continuing education options, and set up special support programs for scientific careers. After all, many colleagues first studied medicine, where they discovered and further developed their interest in computer science. It would be important to look at how many female physicians have acquired the additional medical designation "medical informatics" in recent years and which mechanisms have led to the fact that almost exclusively men have been appointed to the newly created professorships. This is where we need to start and develop explicitly gender-appropriate career paths.
What would you like to pass on to women who want to enter medical informatics? Do it. It's a great interdisciplinary field where all kinds of skills and talents are equally needed, regardless of gender attributions. Digitization in healthcare is diverse, and as is true everywhere, the process needs to be shaped by broad participation from society so that diversity is reflected in the requirements and implementation. Medical informatics plays an essential role here, and active participation in one of the most important digital transformations is implicit. The shortage of specialists is enormous and the career prospects are excellent. Whether you are a career changer or a medical informatics specialist - in women's networks such as shehealth or medF3 you will meet like-minded people.
Please finish the following sentence: Working in the HiGHmed Consortium of the Medical Informatics Initiative is important to me because...
...I can actively shape the digital transformation of healthcare towards better healthcare here.
