The Healthtech Adria conference returns to the University of Split School of Medicine on 1 and 2 October, and this year the organisers are especially keen to see more people from the tech community in the audience – developers, designers, product managers, AI experts and startup founders, including everyone who has so far assumed healthtech isn’t for them.

That’s why they handed the floor to one of our own. Antonio Perić-Mažar from Locastic, a long-standing face of Split’s tech scene, sat down with Marko Mimica from NetHub to explain why Healthtech Adria isn’t a conference only for healthcare professionals and where the tech community fits into the whole story. We’re publishing the interview in full.

When we talk about healthtech, the first things that come to mind are usually doctors, hospitals and medical technology. But the development of modern healthcare solutions increasingly depends on know-how from the tech world – from software and digital product development, UX and working with data to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

Bringing these different perspectives together is exactly what the Healthtech Adria conference is built on. It takes place on 1 and 2 October at the University of Split School of Medicine and brings together healthcare institutions and doctors, researchers, startups, the tech and pharmaceutical industries, investors and other stakeholders involved in developing and applying healthcare innovation. This year’s edition will gather more than 300 attendees, with more than 50 speakers and panellists from over 15 countries and more than 20 startups and scaleups taking part in the programme.

The programme covers the development and implementation of new health technologies, the use of artificial intelligence and health data, product and business model development, commercialisation of research results, collaboration with hospitals and industry, and access to investment.

So where does Split’s tech community fit into all of this? Do you already need to be building a product for healthtech to be relevant to you – or is it precisely developers, product managers, designers, AI experts and startup founders who have the knowledge and experience the healthcare sector increasingly needs?

Ahead of the conference, Marko Mimica from NetHub spoke with Antonio Perić-Mažar from Locastic. Antonio has many years of experience building software products for international clients, a background as an entrepreneur and a strong involvement in Split’s tech community.

They talked about what the tech community can concretely bring to healthcare, where opportunities are opening up for people coming from IT and the startup world, what challenges healthtech startups face, whether Split can become a stronger point in the regional healthtech ecosystem, and why Healthtech Adria can be relevant even to those who don’t necessarily work in healthcare.

Why is healthtech important right now, and why isn’t it reserved only for healthcare professionals?

Because the system is slowly breaking under a burden that isn’t medical in nature. The population is ageing, there are fewer and fewer doctors and nurses, waiting lists are growing, and budgets aren’t growing at the same pace. None of these problems gets solved by doctors working even faster or, as is the case here, working more. It gets solved by organising the work around doctors better – by digitalising processes.

The second reason why now is artificial intelligence. Healthcare is probably the sector where AI will make the biggest difference, for a simple reason: it’s a sector that works with huge amounts of data, while most of the work around the patient is still manual. Today’s models read medical images at a level comparable to a specialist, write and structure documentation instead of doctors, do first-level triage, and speed up drug research and development from years to months. These are no longer on-stage demos – in some systems they’re already in production.

But it’s important to stay cautious here, because I don’t like the hype around AI. AI in healthcare doesn’t just drop into a hospital out of the sky. For a model to be useful, someone has to feed it clean data, integrate it into the existing workflow, make sure the decision is traceable and that someone is accountable for it. A model that is ninety-five percent accurate, but nobody knows why it decided what it decided, is unusable in healthcare. So the revolution won’t happen because of the model, but because of the engineering and product work around the model. And that is exactly the kind of work the tech community knows how to do.

Which brings us to the second part of the question. If we look at where time is really lost in healthcare, much of it isn’t medicine at all. It’s paperwork, entering the same data twice, systems that don’t talk to each other, appointments booked over the phone, test results printed out and carried around in envelopes. These are problems of process, data and user experience. None of us in tech went to medical school, but these are exactly the kinds of problems we solve every day in other industries.

Add to that the regulatory wave coming from Europe, from the European Health Data Space to the AI Act, and you get a situation where healthcare has to digitalise over the next few years, whether it likes it or not. And when something has to happen, space opens up for people who know how to do it – tech companies that have been working on digitalisation and process automation for years.

What can the tech community concretely bring to healthcare?

A few things, in order of importance.

First, product thinking. Healthcare is full of projects that started from a solution rather than a problem. Over the last fifteen years, our industry has learned – quite painfully – how to define a problem before writing the first line of code. If you don’t have a clearly defined problem, you don’t have a product either.

Second, user experience. In healthcare, UX isn’t aesthetics, it’s safety. A badly designed screen in a hospital ultimately means a wrong entry – and potentially the difference between life and death. That’s a level of responsibility designers from other industries aren’t used to, but the working principles are the same.

Third, data and integrations. A hospital usually has several systems that don’t know about each other. People who know the standards, interoperability and how to build a serious data pipeline are worth much more there than they think.

Fourth, security and privacy. Health data is the most sensitive category there is, yet security is still too often something added at the end of a project instead of being built into the design from the start as a critical requirement.

And fifth, the one most often forgotten: speed of delivery combined with discipline. We know how to work in short cycles and iterate. Healthcare knows how to do validation and documentation. The whole point of healthtech is learning to combine the two.

To sum it up in one sentence: the tech community brings healthcare knowledge and expertise in digitalisation and building digital products. What the tech community lacks is healthcare domain knowledge.

Why should developers, product managers, AI experts and startup founders come to Healthtech Adria?

Because in healthtech the most expensive thing is access to domain knowledge, not technology. You can learn healthcare standards in three months if you’re persistent, but in three months you can’t learn what the problems are and how to solve them. Doctors and people who deal with this every day have that domain knowledge, but lack the technical side. Ideally these two worlds come together, and then we can talk about serious projects and innovation in healthtech.

At Healthtech Adria, these people are in the same building for two days. The first day leans more towards the system, public health, research and regulatory pathways. The second day is about business: how investors look at healthtech, partnerships with pharma and big tech, hospital testbeds, data and AI, going to market. If you come from tech, the second day is probably closer to you, but the first day is the one that will explain why your great idea won’t work in practice.

Concretely, I’d put it like this: come to hear how someone who decides on the budget describes their problem in their own words. You can’t google that information. And talk to those people in person, open a discussion about the issues and possible solutions.

What are the biggest obstacles for healthtech startups – and where can tech people help?

The sales cycle. In healthcare you don’t close a deal in three calls, it takes a year and a half – through procurement, through budgets planned in advance and through several levels of decision-making. Startups in this sector most often don’t die because of the product, but because they run out of runway.

Regulation. If your solution falls into the medical device category, you have certification, processes and documentation before your first euro of revenue. It’s an expensive and painstaking process, and not an obstacle you can simply work around. It’s true that once you manage to meet the regulations, they become your friend, because the competition has to go through the same process – but it’s also true that it’s a problem and that many startups fail there. Along with runway, I’d say regulation is the second hardest problem for innovation.

Proof that it works. In tech, traction is enough. In healthcare, they want clinical evidence. A different language, a different standard, a different pace. At the same time, legacy and existing systems have proven themselves in practice and work reliably, while a new (startup) system still has to prove itself – and accepting risk isn’t something that’s common in, say, a public hospital.

Who pays for it? Most often it’s not the person using it. The user is the doctor, the patient benefits, and the hospital or the insurer pays. If you haven’t figured that out, you don’t have a business model, you have a demo. This is significantly different from the classic B2B or B2C principle.

Where tech people concretely help: an architecture that provides for auditing, monitoring and documentation from day one instead of bolting them on later; integration with what the hospital already has, because nobody will throw away an existing system for a new one; and the discipline to narrow the scope of the first product down to one thing that can be proven. I think there needs to be a clear division of domain knowledge: a surgeon with 20 years of experience isn’t a developer, and a developer with 20 years of experience isn’t a surgeon. Both have expertise that can contribute to product development in healthtech, but each should contribute with their own knowledge. The problem here is often not understanding each other’s language, and meddling in a domain that isn’t understood, on both sides. As I’ve already stressed, tech people bring expertise in building digital products and digitalisation, but the domain knowledge has to come from the other side.

Can Split become a relevant point in the regional healthtech ecosystem?

Split has the potential to be a regional ecosystem: we have the School of Medicine, the University Hospital of Split (KBC Split), FESB and the Faculty of Science (PMF), NetHub as a hub that brings them together in one place, and a tech community that has come together through Split Tech City over the last ten years or so. Split is small enough that you can reach anyone in two calls, and big enough that those calls mean something. That’s a real advantage, and we don’t use it enough.

What are we missing? In general, we lack capital and success stories, and especially capital that understands healthcare, because that’s not the same money that invests in classic SaaS. Experience going to foreign markets, because the Croatian market isn’t big enough for any serious healthtech product. And a change of habit so that hospitals are development partners from the start, not just buyers at the end.

We won’t be Copenhagen, and we don’t have to be. A realistic ambition is for Split to be a place where things get tested and validated quickly and then sold abroad. For that we don’t need more conferences, but a few success stories that have gone all the way and that can then be talked about with numbers. Most importantly, we need much more available capital. It may sound harsh, but without capital there’s no startup world, especially not in healthtech.

What will startups and the tech audience get out of the conference – from the pitch competition to contacts with investors and healthcare stakeholders?

Three concrete things.

The first is the competition. HealthTech Adria Awards is a regional startup competition, and the winner goes on to the Startup World Cup. I think it’s an ideal opportunity to see what’s happening in the region and what others are doing, and maybe even get inspired for a new idea.

The second is the investors on the jury. These aren’t people who just dropped by, but funds that really invest in healthcare innovation. Feedback from a jury like that is valuable regardless of who wins. Get to know them, talk to them, whether or not you have a project or are pitching. A good contact is always worth its weight in gold.

The third, and in my view the most important, is the people from hospitals and the system. The programme has over 50 speakers from more than 15 countries, mentor talks, fireside chats and breaks where you have the chance to hang out and meet all the participants. My advice to anyone coming from tech: prepare three questions in advance. Twenty minutes of conversation with the right person will be worth more to you than a whole day of passive listening.

What would you say to people who don’t have a healthtech startup but want to explore the sector?

Come as someone who listens, not as someone who sells. That’s the only difference between a useful and a useless conference.

If you work in tech and are thinking about healthcare, the best question you can ask a doctor isn’t what they think about artificial intelligence, but what took up most of their time today that wasn’t medicine. Products are born from the answers to that question.

And don’t think the only option is to found a startup. You can get a job at a company working in this space, you can work as an external partner, you can contribute to open source tools around health standards, or you can simply learn a vertical that certainly won’t disappear in the next thirty years. Tickets for students and startups are deliberately affordable, which makes this a cheap way to find out whether the sector interests you before you invest a year of your life in it.

Find out more about the programme and speakers on the official conference website, and get your tickets via Entrio. See you on 1 and 2 October at the University of Split School of Medicine!