The remote recipe is getting closer – Newspaper Kommersant No. 29 (7474) of 02/16/2023

The Ministry of Economy proposes to allow private clinics to issue prescriptions for medicines to patients during telemedicine consultations. To test this new practice, the agency plans to launch a three-year pilot project under an experimental legal regime (EPR). The project will have to get approval from the Ministry of Health, which traditionally opposes the use of EPR in medicine. In addition, the “pilot” will most likely be limited to regions with developed IT services for electronic prescriptions — for now, these are only Moscow, the Moscow and Belgorod regions.

The Ministry of Economy proposed to apply the regime of “regulatory sandboxes” (ERS) for the development of telemedicine in the Russian Federation. The corresponding draft government decree is published on the regulation.gov.ru portal.

Telemedicine services in 2018 were included in the program of state guarantees, which determines the list of medical services within the CHI system. However, now only patients who take part in individual pilot projects in the regions and large specialized medical institutions have full access to them. At the same time, the demand for telemedicine is growing, but its development, as commercial players in this market have repeatedly stated, is constrained by the norms of industry legislation. In particular, now, during a telemedicine appointment, a doctor can consult a patient, but does not have the right to diagnose him – this requires an in-person visit to the clinic.

The Ministry of Economy has repeatedly proposed to abandon part of the requirements for conducting teleconsultations, however, these initiatives usually did not receive support from the Ministry of Health – for example, at the beginning of last year, this ministry blocked a proposal to allow diagnoses to be made at a remote appointment (see “Kommersant” dated January 14, 2022 of the year).

As follows from the draft resolution, now the Ministry of Economy proposes to conduct a pilot project within the framework of the EPR with the participation of 15 private medical clinics (including, for example, Medsi departments in different regions of the country). Doctors in these clinics will be able to write prescriptions to patients during a telemedicine consultation, but only if the remote consultation is repeated after the face-to-face one. They will also have the opportunity to correct the diagnosis, again – if it was already determined during the initial face-to-face appointment. The time limit between appointments cannot exceed 30 days, and they must take place on the basis of the same clinic.

As RIA Novosti was told in the Ministry of Health, the department supports the use of telemedicine technologies “subject to minimizing the risks for both the patient and the doctor” and has already sent a number of comments to the project of the Ministry of Economy. It should be noted that even if the economic department accepts them, the project may not receive the approval of the state legal department of the president, which previously opposed the use of EPR in cases where it could threaten the life and health of consumers (for more details, see “Kommersant” dated July 22, 2022 of the year). Another obstacle to the implementation of the pilot project may be the lack of the necessary IT infrastructure – so far only three Russian regions (Moscow, Moscow and Belgorod regions) have created information systems that allow for the circulation of electronic prescriptions for medicines.

Anastasia Manuylova