In the last week of June, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution began a series of working meetings with Serbian patient associations. One of the Centre’s main goals is to support Serbia’s biomedical and biotech sectors, with the ultimate goal of improving the situation in healthcare. In this process, it is important for us to be in contact with end users – patients, and find out what the challenges are that different groups of patients face, as well as suggestions on how the Centre’s activities might help solve some of these problems.

The first to visit us were representatives of the National Organization for Rare Diseases of Serbia (NORBS), an association that deals with the issues of people with rare diseases and their family members. Then Association of Women Diagnosed and Treated for Breast Cancer “Budimo zajedno”, Citizens’ Association for The Fight Against Lung Cancer “Punim plucima”, and the Patients Forum of Serbia visited us.

We discussed the challenges that different groups of patients face, current procedures for diagnosis and therapy, the state of digitization in healthcare, the existence of public registers, the importance of genetic sequencing in diagnosing and personalized patient therapy, etc.

In the coming period, the Centre will also meet with a number of other patient associations with the same goal – to come up with ideas jointly so that changes in regulations, implementation of new technologies and the work of the Centre can help patients in Serbia in the future.