CHALLENGES:

• Russia’s healthcare operates amid low health awareness of the general public coupled with financial and governance bottlenecks

“Unhealthy behaviour and low health awareness, the lack of involvement on the part of people are a key issue,” said Pavel Kadochnikov, President, Center for Strategic Research Foundation.

“However, the diffusion of new drugs is quite slow in Russia and in some other countries, that is very few patients would have access to a new drug even, like, seven or eight years after its launch,” said Frank Lichtenberg, Courtney C. Brown Professor of Business, Columbia University.

“The problem and task is to boost the system’s performance within the budget available for now. That does not mean the system needs no more money, that means spending must be efficient,” said Leonid Melamed, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Team Drive.

• Primary care talent shortages and poor emergency care performance. These are the focus in western healthcare

“We have fewer primary care doctors, with more admissions,” said Pavel Kadochnikov.

“Today, the task is to switch to general or family practice as the core of primary care <…>. The newcomers are often not ready to work at all, just not prepared for regular independent work. There are very few isolated guidelines on training a family practitioner <…>,” said Grigory Roytberg, Chief Executive Officer, Medicina.

“Emergency care in this country, unfortunately, lags behind in terms of the hospital admission stage. In other nations, this stage is much more mature, with smart reception wards, emergency rooms, emergency departments. In this country, we are just approaching that,” said Sergey Bagnenko, Rector, First Pavlov St. Petersburg State Medical University.

SOLUTIONS:

• Increasing accessibility of healthcare through hi-tech

“In hard-to-reach locations, air medical service, online consultancy <…>, IT development are key to effective healthcare,” said Igor Kagramanyan, First Deputy Minister of Healthcare of the Russian Federation.

“Experts claim there are three factors to boost effectiveness in healthcare: public access to quality healthcare with a focus on prevention, healthcare integration, IT and online care,” said Arman Voskerchyan, General Director in Russia, Belarus, Transcaucasia and Central Asia, Philips.

• Identifying opportunities to boost healthcare investment

“We need greater investment in human capital. According to our extremely precise estimates, government spending on healthcare may be expanded from the current 3.7% of GDP to 4.4%,” said Pavel Kadochnikov.

• Systematic effort to address imbalances in healthcare development

“Structural change in healthcare itself is vital: Primary care, better coverage by general practitioners, dedicated treatment for patients with chronic conditions,” said Pavel Kadochnikov.

“There is a huge headroom, that is an effective and efficient logistics system to be delivered that will help bring a patient where necessary as and when required without any excessive intermediate admissions,” said Sergey Bagnenko.