The remote doctor comes closer – Newspaper Kommersant No. 204 (7405) dated 11/02/2022

In 2023, the Ministry of Health and the Rostec State Corporation will launch a pilot project to monitor the health status of Russians with diabetes and hypertension. It will be attended by 25 thousand people from six regions of the country. For the pilot, Rostec will develop a separate technological platform called Personal Medical Assistant.

From 2023, the government will launch a pilot for remote monitoring of the health status of patients with diabetes and hypertension. The relevant draft government decree was posted by the Ministry of Health on the regulation.gov.ru portal. As follows from the explanatory note to the document, it was developed on behalf of First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov.

It should be noted that for the first time the idea of ​​such a project arose in the early 2010s and in 2015-2018 it was implemented in some Russian regions, in particular in the Belgorod, Voronezh and Leningrad regions. Then the focus was only on patients with high blood pressure – thanks to the automatic transmission of information about his indications, the attending physicians of the pilot participants could quickly adjust the therapy, which, as the head of the Ministry of Health Veronika Skvortsova said at the time, allowed twice as many patients to lower the level of pressure. This, in turn, made it possible to reduce the burden on the healthcare system, as the number of ambulance calls decreased by 70%, and hospitalizations by 50% (for more details, see Kommersant of October 28, 2019).

At the end of 2019, the Ministry of Health discussed the possibility of extending this experience to the federal level, but the department postponed this initiative, probably due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, the current pilot, as follows from his description, will begin by formulating, among other things, the basic requirements for the details of the monitoring process.

As Kommersant was told in the Ministry of Health, within the framework of the current project, it is planned to form requirements for a platform of centralized diagnostic services, a target model for remote monitoring of the patient’s health and determine the parameters for the digital transformation of dispensary observation through the introduction of modern technologies for its organization. In addition, it is planned to develop medical and technical requirements for “personal medical assistants” (medical products for long-term health monitoring) and protocols for their information interaction with the platform. As part of the pilot project, it is planned to create methodological centers on the basis of two national medical research centers of the Ministry of Health – the Chazov National Medical Research Center for Cardiology and the National Medical Research Center for Endocrinology.

“The project proposed by the Ministry of Health involves the creation of an entire ecosystem of remote monitoring. One of its elements will be a technological platform that connects medical devices with both existing medical systems and new services that will be developed and tested based on the results of piloting, ”the press service of Rostec told Kommersant. The development of such a technological platform – the information system “Personal Medical Assistant” – is carried out by the enterprises of the Ruselectronics holding, which is part of the state corporation. The operator will be its managing organization JSC “OPK”. According to Rostec, 25 thousand people living in six regions of the Russian Federation will take part in the pilot project of the Ministry of Health: Novosibirsk, Samara, Tyumen, Ryazan and Magadan regions, as well as the Republic of Tatarstan. As for the choice of diseases for monitoring, as the Ministry of Health explained to Kommersant, high blood pressure, for example, is one of the most common cardiovascular diseases (more than 40 million patients in the Russian Federation), it is also a risk factor for stroke and heart attack.

As Kommersant’s source in Rostec emphasized, “it’s too early to talk about the amount of expenses for the pilot,” however, as follows from the draft resolution, the Ministry of Health does not intend to request additional funds from the federal budget. In 2019, when the Ministry of Health proposed to adopt the experience of pilot projects at the federal level, the department proceeded from the fact that the cost of servicing one patient as part of remote monitoring would be 4 thousand rubles. per year – it is obvious that over the past three years this figure has grown uncritically.

Anastasia Manuylova