ASEF Podcast (SLO): Blaž Triglav [Episode #58]

In the latest episode of the ASEF Healthcare Verticals podcast, Luka Petravić hosts Blaž Triglav, CEO and co-founder of Mediately. Blaž studied Business Economics with a focus on Technology Management at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, and shortly after graduating co-founded a company with his friends that now reaches more than 300,000 doctors across 14 European countries through its digital healthcare solutions.

The conversation begins with the formation of the team and the entrepreneurial journey from the original Modra Jagoda to the internationally established Mediately. Blaž explains how the team identified a problem in accessing medicine information and developed a mobile application that enabled doctors to find relevant data more quickly and easily, replacing information that had often been available mainly through less accessible documents and PDFs.

A significant part of the episode focuses on open medicine data and the challenges of collecting, standardizing, and localizing it across different European markets. The discussion also covers Slovenia’s renewed national medicine registry, the Central Database of Medicinal Products (CBZ), differences between national systems, and the role of the European Medicines Agency in centralized authorization procedures.

The conversation then turns to Mediately’s additional features, from clinical decision-support tools to medical education, as well as the growing role of artificial intelligence. Blaž explains the challenges of ensuring reliable AI-generated answers, providing references, and preventing hallucinations in a field where accuracy is essential. The discussion also addresses missing medicine data and the specific challenges related to importing medicines into Slovenia.

Blaž and Luka also discuss clinical calculators, comparisons with international platforms such as MDCalc, and the Digital Doctor Survey, which provides insights into how doctors use digital technologies. They also explore Mediately’s business model, which combines advertising with the Mediately Pro subscription service.

In the second part of the episode, the conversation broadens to the state of healthcare digitalization in Slovenia and how the country compares with other European healthcare systems. Blaž also shares his experience of building a technology company, searching for investors, and developing a multidisciplinary team that brings together technological, business, and medical expertise.

The episode concludes with a discussion about working in health technology, the quality of Slovenian talent, and the challenge of balancing rapid company growth with personal life. The conversation offers an insight into one of Slovenia’s successful healthtech stories and the broader opportunities and challenges shaping the digitalization of European healthcare.