Miroslav Končar
Director, Healthcare and Education Industry, Oracle ECEMEA
LinkedIn profile

Title: Technological Disruption

Abstract
We live in the age of tremendous growth in medical knowledge, which has resulted in fantastic quality of life improvements. An illustration of the progress is the increase in life expectancy about one year every four years since the early 1990s in the OECD zone. However, the systems of care delivery have not change significantly for number of decades now. Health service delivery still follows centralized factory based model, where by definition any personalization drives additional costs and increased waiting lists time. On top of that, the system is highly complex and heavily regulated, and it is no surprise that the costs are staggering while at the same time patient experience is far from satisfactory.
However, this model may be now finally heavily challenges. Technologies such as cloud, social and mobile are enabling disruptive innovators to enter the market, with typical properties of successful disruptive models. It usually starts by new businesses outside of the standard hospital segment, and target non-consumers (e.g. people with rare and chronic conditions) to provide highly personalized service in different value network. At the same time, we see the typical solution provider of healthcare technologies overshooting the needs of an average customer, which is another platform for disruption – the entrance of new modular solution based on standard interfaces and plug and play capabilities. How serious this is really? Well, just ask those supercomputer manufacturers like DEC who went out of business when PC industry created the disruption.
This however is all potentially very beneficial to the patient, since it will allow much more patient empowerment, emotional and professional support, and personalized therapies with, as the industry matures, likely even better outcomes. And the Public Sector healthcare, well, for them, it is a massive opportunity – just imagine a smart government who will build GCloud for data collection and Health Apps Store to allow better, safer and fully legally compliant usage of all these different business models. Wouldn’t this be fantastic way to make better policies decisions?
Let me finish by quoting Economist blog published in January 2015 (link) – the most surprising disruptive innovations will come from bottom-of-the-pyramid entrepreneurs who are inventing new ways of delivering education and health-care for a fraction of the cost of current market leaders.

CV
Miroslav Končar PhD, was born on 25th of September, 1975, in Zagreb. He has earned Bachelor, Masters and PhD degrees from Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1999, 2002, and 2007 respectively. Currently, he is employed as Business Development Director for Healthcare and Education segment in Oracle, and acts as one of the strategy leaders and key experts in the domain of eHealth in Oracle and beyond. His responsibilities include Oracle Healthcare and Education IT Industry Solutions business development, strategic project sales support and thought leadership across ECEMEA (East and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa) region. In the capacity of his role, Miroslav is representing Oracle in various think tanks and European Commission projects and flagship initiatives, such as epSOS Large Scale Pilot, EU 2020 Strategy, Digital Agenda for Europe, and COCIR. Miroslav is also member of Oracle Healthcare Industry Board on EMEA level (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
Miroslav is very active in eHealth professional community. He has served two mandates as the co-chair of HL7 International Affiliate Committee (2003-2007), and currently holds the position of HL7 Croatia Affiliate Chair. In addition, Miroslav holds the honorary associate professor position at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, Croatia, where he teaches Biomedical Informatics for undergraduate studies. During his scientific career he has published more than 20 technical and scientific papers in various publications, journals, and conference proceedings, most of them dealing with various aspects of eHealth implementations. He is a certified HL7 expert.
Before joining Oracle, Miroslav has served several positions in Ericsson Nikola Tesla, a subsidiary of Ericsson AB in Croatia (1999-2008). During that period he was responsible for starting eHealth business vertical unit and telemedicine solutions for Ericsson, including the definition and roll out of the national eHealth infrastructure in Croatia. Just before leaving Ericsson, Miroslav was leading a team of experts in MPOWER project (European Commission FP7 Call5 project), focusing on advanced services for managing dementia conditions and elderly people.
Miroslav is based in Zagreb, Croatia. He is married and a proud father of two children.