Helsi medical information system

Helsi medical information system

Basic Information
Release Year	2016
Product Type	healthcare
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://helsi.me/

Helsi was created as a private medical information system during Ukraine’s major healthcare reforms. Its primary goal was to connect clinics and patients to the state's Central Database of eHealth (ЕСОЗ). To patients, Helsi offered a revolutionary, clean, and free portal to book appointments with family doctors, view prescriptions, and track vaccinations. It quickly grew to hold the medical records of over 23 million Ukrainians.

Consumer-impact summary

Since 2021, when Helsi has acquired a critical mass of users, said users have begun facing paywalls on popular features that used to be free, targeting advertisement using their own data, privacy concerns and the risk of complete exclusion from the digital healthcare ecosystem in their place of habitation if their local hospitals have signed software contracts with Helsi and didn't do so with any competitors.

Incidents

Ad Integration and Commercialization

The app became increasingly cluttered with ads and targeted medical marketing under its "Helsi Neuron" B2B suite. Helsi themselves promote this service as using the data aggregated from its many customers for targeted advertising.

The "Ghost Visits" Scandal and Privacy Breakdown (2023)

In May 2023, a massive scandal erupted. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians discovered fake appointments, virtual consultations, and random diagnoses in their Helsi medical histories that they had never scheduled or attended. Under Ukraine's healthcare funding model ("money follows the patient"), public clinics receive state payouts from the National Health Service based on these recorded visits. Systemic design vulnerabilities allowed doctors and clinics to easily log these "ghost visits" to meet quotas and extract state funds. When users complained that their medical history was being corrupted with fraudulent data, Helsi largely deflected responsibility, claiming it was merely an intermediary connecting doctors to the state database and that only doctors were to blame.

Helsi Plan (2025)

Features that were previously free or presented as public-benefit tools began moving behind a paywall. In 2024, Helsi introduced an AI-powered tool to decode lab test results. By late 2025, Helsi announced that this tool, alongside other basic wellness features (like in-app pulse measurement and cardiac history tracking), would be restricted to the "Helsi Plan" subscription, costing 80 UAH per month.