Book excerpt: The Covid-19 pandemic affected the daily lives of all of us on many levels. Epidemiology suddenly became a personal matter and general interest in many aspects of medical data science became much more widespread. And physical distance became the new normal. This book presents the full paper part of the proceedings of GMDS 2023, the 68th annual meeting of the German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology, held from 17 to 21 September 2023 in Heilbronn, Germany. The theme of the conference was, Science. Close to People, a particularly appropriate theme for the first of these annual conferences to be held face-to-face since 2019. A total of 227 scientific contributions were submitted to GMDS 2023, including 41 full papers for this volume in Studies in HTI. Of these, 30 papers are included here, following a rigorous two-stage review process, which represents an acceptance rate of 73%. The 30 papers in this book are grouped under 8 headings: FAIRification; research software engineering for research infrastructure & study data management; human factors; data quality; clinical decision support & artificial intelligence; evaluation of healthcare IT; biosignals; and interoperability. Providing a broad overview of current developments in the disciplines of medical informatics, biometry and epidemiology, the book will be of interest to all those working in these fields.