On August 21, the 14th Biennial Conference of the Asia Pacific Association of Medical Informatics(APAMI 2026) officially opened in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.
This conference is initiated by the International Medical Informatics Association and the Asia‑Pacific Association for Medical Informatics, and hosted by the Bioinformatics Society of Sichuan province. Professor Alvin Marcelo serves as Conference Chair, Professor Shen Bairong as Executive Conference Chair, and Professor Zhang Bolun as Co‑Executive Conference Chair.
This marks the first time this key international conference has been held in western China, constituting a landmark event for western China to host high‑end academic resources of Asia‑Pacific medical informatics.
It marks the formal integration of Western China into the highend AsiaPacific academiccollaboration system for digital healthcare. The conference brought together nearly 350 distinguished experts, clinical practitioners, and representatives from innovative enterprises across 12 countries, including Germany, the United States, Australia, Japan and the Philippines.Indepth crossborder deliberations were conducted on core themes such as cuttingedge innovations in digital healthcare, realworld clinical deployment, crossborder academic collaboration, and joint development of industry standards.
The conference invited world-leading scholars in medical informatics to deliver keynote addresses. Among them, Professor Peter L. Elkin, a founding figure in medical semantic AI and the inaugural recipient of the Homer R. Warner Award — the highest honor in medical informatics — developed the SCAI Semantic Clinical AI Framework. It provides a groundbreaking technical paradigm for the development of trustworthy large-scale medical AI models and intelligent clinical decision-making. Professor Yves A. Lussier, an internationally renowned authority in translational bioinformatics and precision medicine, holds dual credentials as both an engineer and a clinician. As the originator of the N-of-1-pathways framework, he participated in the early expansion of the SNOMED international medical terminology system, laying solid academic foundations for medical ontologies and clinical semantic standards.Keynote presentations covered frontier research areas such as biomedical ontology construction, clinical semantic artificial intelligence, trustworthy medical large language models, uncertainty-aware machine learning, and translational precision medicine.
The conference prioritized solutions to long-standing industry pain points, including reasoning bias in medical AI, inconsistent medical data standards, and bottlenecks hindering the clinical translation of research outcomes. It presented novel academic concepts and practical innovations to support the iterative upgrading of global digital health technologies, the optimization of industrial standards, and the safe and standardized clinical implementation of emerging technologies. A series of complementary thematic sessions were also organized, covering nursing informatics, medical large language models for clinical AI, computational biology of ageing, industrial translation exchanges, and youth innovation leadership, comprehensively covering the core research and application scenarios of modern digital healthcare.
Aligned with the global development trend of digital health, the conference breaks geographical limitations, accommodates diversified healthcare systems worldwide, and balances cutting-edge technological exploration in developed economies with digital construction demands in developing countries. It has successfully built a high-level Asia-Pacific academic cooperation platform featuring equality, openness, mutual benefit and shared progress.
Adhering to the international exchange principle of integrating academic research with practical applications and bridging theoretical innovation with real-world clinical practice, the conference arranged an exclusive on-site field visit program. Foreign delegates visited leading local medical institutions in Chengdu to observe the practical operation of smart wards, digital elderly care services, and AI-powered clinical decision systems. They gained first-hand and in-depth insights into China’s mature practices in digital health infrastructure development, smart medical service promotion, and intelligent elderly health management. The visits laid a solid practical foundation for in-depth international technical exchanges, scenario-based adaptation, experience replication, and the implementation of cross-border cooperation projects between Chinese and foreign institutions.
As one of the most influential international academic events in the Asia-Pacific digital healthcare field, APAMI 2026 carries important global public value and regional empowerment significance. Hosted in Chengdu, Sichuan, the conference fully demonstrates the strong scientific and technological innovation vitality and high-level opening-up capacity of inland China. Boasting a large number of top-tier research institutions, high-quality clinical resources and thriving digital industry entities, Sichuan has grown into a core innovation hub for digital health and bioinformatics in Western China, with abundant real-world medical application scenarios and robust computing infrastructure support. On the international front, the conference serves as a core platform for equal dialogue and collaborative governance among Asia-Pacific economies. It effectively promotes the mutual recognition of regional medical informatics standards, the formulation of cross-border data governance norms, the joint development of clinical AI safety systems, and the sharing of advanced digital elderly health service experiences. The conference accelerates the two-way flow of technology, talent and industrial resources across the region, continuously bridges the digital health development gaps among Asia-Pacific regions, and improves the long-term collaborative mechanism for regional health development. China will continue to share its mature research, clinical and industrial achievements, contributing valuable practical experiences to promote the coordinated and high-quality development of the Asia-Pacific digital health ecosystem.
