Heliant first contributed to the Serbian healthcare system two decades ago, when the company created the healthcare information system. In the past year, Heliant was available 24/7 to be able to fulfil all the requests coming from Covid hospitals and centres.
Even though I’d like to believe that our engineers are the ones who make Heliant great, the true power of the company lies in the fact that many smart people use our system. Their useful feedback helps us improve it. All we need to do is listen and acknowledge the user requirements – said Mr Radulović modestly.
Although more than 200 healthcare institutions in Serbia use your software daily, it was not until the pandemic broke out that it became obvious how valuable it truly is.
– Nowadays, information systems do not only serve as data storages but are also used to retrieve useful information. Our system is expandable and adjustable to different areas of medicine and, as we have seen in the past year, different working conditions too.
Last year, at the very beginning of the pandemic, it took us only a day to connect the Laboratory of virusology and the Clinic for Infectious Diseases of the Clinical Centre of Serbia. That way, we made over 300 documents available in digital form to avoid having to rely on the potentially infectious physical copies.
We are currently developing registries for different types of disciplines in specialized medicine, mobile apps for patients and our own data visualisation systems. We have also expanded our department of science upon realising we could benefit from having an extra link between us and the medical professionals. Heliant now employs three doctors and two experts in biochemistry and pharmacy, and we regret not having hired them five years ago.
Two months ago, Heliant became a member of the National Alliance for Local Economic Development (NALED). Do you see this as another way to potentially contribute to the improvement of the Serbian healthcare system?
– When it comes to our NALED membership, we also regret not having joined in much sooner. Anyone dedicated to bypassing excessive paperwork and unnecessary administrative and bureaucratic procedures is our natural ally, and healthcare is the right place to focus on achieving this. Heliant supported the e-prescription project, thus helping to reduce the number of used paper copies by five million.
Data is a valuable resource, which further gains importance if we can share, exchange and cross-reference it
Even though we should always strive to improve all kinds of citizens’ rights, from passport issuance to obtaining construction permits, there is nothing more important than providing healthcare to the ones in need. If we manage to replace excessive administrative procedures in healthcare with technology and facilitate access to healthcare services for millions of people, in cooperation with NALED and any other interested party, we will have done a great thing.
How will medicine develop in the forthcoming period?
– We aim to further improve our department of science to make Heliant an asset for various experts and the entire scientific community. For this purpose, we are already working on creating specialised registries of medical conditions on the level of individual hospitals, as well as the entire country. Collecting raw information and data is not enough because they have to be well-structured, which means the information system is becoming the expert information system.
We are witnessing a great transformation in the area of medicine, which is switching from traditional clinical studies to the socalled data-driven medicine. The aim is to make relevant research data, previously available only to a limited audience, accessible worldwide so that different pieces of information could be cross-referenced, processed and compared. The time has come to acknowledge the fact that data is a valuable resource, which further gains importance if we can share, exchange and cross-reference it.