Jiří Pecina: Czech Meddi reaches all insurers in Slovakia

Jiří Pecina, founder and CEO of the Czech tech company Meddi, has rolled out his digital telemedicine platform across the entire Slovak market — clients of all three of the country's insurance companies can now use it. The family business, which posted turnover of more than 600 million crowns last year, has grown without a single outside investor.

The idea behind the service is simple: patients don't need to decide for themselves whether to see a GP, a specialist, call an ambulance or go to hospital — they just describe the problem, and the system directs them to the right doctor. According to Pecina, Meddi connects a patient with a doctor within two minutes, and thanks to integration with Slovakia's National Health Information Center (NCZI) and the eZdravie portal, it also provides access to medical records and sixteen medical specializations.

If an online consultation isn't enough, the platform itself books the patient in for an in-person appointment. Pecina sees Meddi's full, 100-percent coverage of Slovakia as a major success — while admitting it also frustrates him that his home country, Czechia, lags behind on this front.

“Here we're still talking about digitizing healthcare someday. Meanwhile, the technology that can already do it was developed by a Czech company. We simply got the chance to show its scale across an entire country in Slovakia before we did at home,” notes the Meddi chief.

According to him, Slovakia, which is suffering from an acute shortage of doctors, chose Meddi partly because the company managed to offer each insurer an individual solution on a single platform connected to the state healthcare system. Each insurer gets its own visual interface and its own program for the insured.

It's precisely this flexibility, Pecina believes, that makes it possible to scale the technology across different countries without building a separate, massive application from scratch for each one. In Czechia, the platform currently serves 1.9 million residents through regions, companies and individual hospitals, while Meddi as a whole operates in 17 countries — including Poland, Hungary, Germany, Slovenia, Serbia, as well as Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico and, most recently, Algeria. In addition, an agreement has been reached with Morocco's state insurer to supply the Meddi Diabetes system nationwide.

Pecina built the company together with his wife, Alena Ingrid Pecinová, whom Forbes named to its list of the two hundred most influential women in Czechia and who is behind the platform's development. Meddi has grown without raising outside investment — the company funds its development and international expansion from its own resources, reinvesting profit into technology and growth.

“We never built Meddi in order to sell it to an investor a few years down the line. We want to create a European health-tech company with a long-term impact. Having no outside investors lets us make decisions on a ten-to-twenty-year horizon, rather than under pressure from the next funding round,” Jiří Pecina concludes.