Only 180 IT Specialists Employed in Croatian Hospitals

The first conference on IT and business solutions in healthcare, organized by IN2 in collaboration with its partner Hrvatski Telekom, was opened today in Tuheljske Toplice.

– We are pleased that people who recognize the importance of IT have come to power, but the situation on the ground is still far from satisfactory. We have brought experts from the industry to the conference who will explain what the situation is like in other industries and how it is in the world – said Branka Lasić, Director of the Healthcare Sector at IN2, at the opening of the conference, wanting to emphasize that progress is visible, but insufficient as Croatia significantly lags behind in investments in healthcare IT.
This was just an introduction to the round table ‘How Much Does IT Really Cost’ where trends and needs of Croatian healthcare from a technological perspective were discussed by Ante Mandić, Director of IN2, Ivan Vidaković, Director of Microsoft Croatia, Ivan Maglić, Director of the Gartner office for the Adriatic region, Miroslav Mađarić, advisor to the director of KBC Zagreb for IT, and
Boris Bauk, Director of Hewlett Packard.

How much room there is for improvement in Croatia could also be seen from the data presented by Ivan Maglić, Director of Gartner, according to which we are significantly below the world average spending on healthcare IT, which is 3.2 percent. Equally disappointing is the fact that Croatia currently employs only 180 IT specialists in hospitals, which is significantly lower than the world average of 2.9 percent of employees in hospitals. For example, in KBC Zagreb, which represents a positive example, out of 5,500 employees, only 24 are IT specialists, which is 0.44 percent.

– Better system efficiency could be achieved even with equal investments through system centralization, cloud computing, and Software as a Service, as technology can make the existing system more efficient – said Ante Mandić, CEO of IN2. The need to use cloud computing was also pointed out by Ivan Vidaković, Director of Microsoft Croatia, who emphasized that costs can be reduced by using the cloud, in which a quarter of data space will be related to healthcare in the future.