She is used to adapting to the changing circumstances of the world and now, since April 2025, Svetlana is part of our customer support team. Among other things, she adapts the wound documentation fields based on individual requests so that each hospital can quickly document exactly the details that are important to its medical staff.

Svetlana, our product owner Anastasiya brought you to imito?

Yes, Anastasiya and I were neighbours in Berlin for quite some time and got to know each other through our children on the playground 18 years ago.

At some point, she started doing a master's degree in IT - and I got inspired and thought: well, maybe it's time to combine project management and IT. Now we both work in IT at imito, still see each other privately from time to time, and both help out at Ukrainian volunteer projects.

What exactly do you do as volunteers in these projects?

Anastasiya helps out at an organisation that arranges the transport of all kinds of supplies to Ukraine. For example, this Saturday they received 80 LTE routers, which will then be shipped to Ukraine.

I have been running an association for 3 years now, that helps Ukrainian refugee children right here in Berlin. We help children who want to learn Python or Scratch, who want to build a simple website with HTML and CSS - but also those who have never used a computer before and want to learn what parts it is made of and how it works.

From time to time, we receive laptops and other IT donations from various companies. The children can unscrew them, clean them and upgrade them. When they get them working again, they are very happy that they have repaired something themselves.

If laptops are still in very good condition, we pass them on to other non-profit organisations so that they can be taken to Ukraine and used by people there to do something great. We dismantle all the others here. 

What originally brought you to Germany?

I actually wanted to go to France after making lots of French friends in Cambodia. On my way from Prague to Paris, I ended up staying in Berlin - and I liked the mix of great people and that special vibe there even more than Paris.

And what exactly do you do now at imito?

I mostly work together with Florian and Christoph in the customer support team. In addition to support requests, one of my main tasks is to implement the customisation requests of our hospital customers.

In imitoCam & imitoWound, users can precisely document wounds and their therapy choices. If a hospital requests individual adjustments to the wound documentation parameters, I usually receive an Excel list with numerous fields and corrections. Based on this, I update the existing JSON configuration, check the changes line by line and test them. The interface is then automatically generated from the JSON.

What are some examples of such customisation requests?

Some clinics want a detailed list of antiseptics and the pharmaceutical manufacturers in the therapy documentation. Others want a simple field indicating whether the dressing has been changed or not - possibly with the exact date when this took place. This allows nursing staff to simply tick a box instead of writing this into a free text field. This makes it much easier to find important documentation details for anyone to review.

Have you already worked in the healthcare industry before joining imito?

I worked for several years at the Tentamus Group, which is an international network of laboratories active in the pharmaceutical, food and medical device sectors. There, I was involved in IT and process standardisation, harmonising procedures and optimising digital processes. I also have a bit of a connection to healthcare in my private life: my eldest daughter is a PhD student in bioinformatics and has been conducting research in the field of cancer treatment at the Berlin hospital Charité for several years.

Most recently, I spent three years working on the Piveau project at the Fraunhofer Institute. We worked on a platform that not only collects administrative data, but also processes it in such a way that cities, authorities and research institutions can really use it, for example to create better services or new digital applications.

But you did a few other things before that, didn't you?

Yes, I did quite a few things. I worked in medium-sized companies, was at a radio station and also worked as a personal assistant for very wealthy people, organising their yachting trips and booking restaurants in South Africa. Looking back, all quite exciting experiences. It probably also helped that I speak several languages.

A somewhat exotic language that I know is Khmer (Cambodian). Because at the start of my career, I studied Asian Studies for six years and specialised in Khmer. After that, I worked as a translator in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a year. I still read Cambodian news from time to time – the Chinese influence is steadily growing there.

Do you miss your time there?

It was interesting, but not quite the right thing for me. The difference in mentality was quite significant. In Cambodia, there isn’t such a linear concept of life as we have, with a beginning and an end, but rather a cyclical way of thinking with reincarnations. That changes the perspective on many things and is sometimes difficult for Europeans to grasp. After that time, I went to Berlin and, inspired by Anastasiya, studied media and business informatics.

So you can code - have you ever written software for yourself?

Oh yes, from time to time. Not every day, but I regularly develop little things for myself or my family. Last month, for example, I coded a small radio app for my boyfriend’s grandma.

She’s super, super old - 95 years to be precise. She was born in Odessa and spent almost her entire life there, so German isn’t her native language. Today she lives in a care home in Flensburg, where her family visits her regularly. Still, she often felt lonely during the day, because the other elderly residents would watch TV together - but she hardly understands it.

So I built her a little app on her simple Android phone: two big buttons - one for Radio Israel in Russian, the other for a radio station from Prague. Now, she is very happy about these two buttons. We also got her large children’s headphones - purple, with just two buttons so she can easily find and use them. For the app I chose JavaScript/TypeScript with NativeScript: I implemented the logic in TypeScript, described the layout in XML, and styled it with CSS. In the end it wasn’t all that complicated - linked the streams, placed the buttons - done.

No other app on her phone?

No, at 95 that would just be far too much confusion. Imagine, so many tiny icons on the phone and always having to find the right one first. For us, there was really only one thing that mattered: that it’s super easy to use - ideally one press of a button, and the radio is playing.

With all the things you’ve done, what earned you your very first money?

When I was 12, I travelled to Estonia with my whole school class to work in agriculture. For very little money, but a lot of fun, we collected stones from the fields. After the rain they would appear, and they had to be cleared so that the work on the fields could carry on.

A really simple job: throwing stones onto the tractor. But for us, it was a huge adventure. It felt like a world trip - travelling there by night train, communicating with hands and feet, and feeling like we were discovering a piece of the world.

Svetlana, thank you so much for your adaptability, altruism, and wide-ranging experience that you bring to the imito team.