Technology of the future
The whole crazy hospital gathered at the screens
Andrey Potapenko, "Doctor Peter"
How can new digital technologies help today's medicine make a qualitative breakthrough? Not only doctors are thinking about this. The other day, the Skolkovo Innovation Center hosted specialists in various fields – doctors, programmers, officials and merchants to try to find an answer to these questions.
Medicine is a very suitable field for technological breakthroughs and innovations. This industry, which is not in danger of disappearing, will always develop, and the demand for quality medicine in the 21st century will only grow. This is a rare case when society expects miracles from doctors, and officials are in a fighting mood. But at the same time, medicine is a socially sensitive and very conservative industry. And as with every patient, the principle of "do no harm" is generally applicable to her.
This internal contradiction was clearly reflected in the law on telemedicine that came into force this year. Many people were waiting for him, because until now this part of medical activity was not regulated at all, and those doctors who experimented with it acted at their own risk. The law was lobbied by both medical institutions and large technology companies. However, the result disappointed many – the law establishes so many barriers to telemedicine that it actually imposes a ban on its widespread use.
What, in its most general form, is telemedicine? This is an opportunity to bring high-quality medical care to the most remote corners with the help of modern technologies. Our country, with its vast territories, needs it like no other. Imagine the most qualified doctors in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who, without leaving their offices, receive farmers from distant villages, polar explorers from Arctic stations, truckers from the Krasnoyarsk-Abakan highway. Receiving on the monitor screen all the data they need to make a decision – ultrasound, cardiograms, and MRI, doctors prescribe the necessary treatment to patients, without forcing them to drag themselves far away and sit in stuffy queues of medical centers. It's beautiful, isn't it?! Here are the prospects for high-quality remote diagnosis of cardio-diseases. And opportunities for cancer prevention through remote screening. And prospects for reducing mortality in road accidents.
Successful examples of the use of telemedicine already exist. Large federal clinics, such as the Almazov St. Petersburg NMIC, are already gaining experience in monitoring their patients from remote territories at a distance. There are programs that allow you to consult with the help of telemetry equipment polar explorers from distant stations or, for example, to help seriously ill people in places of detention. But all these are only separate experiments so far. And they all work successfully only when specialist doctors are sitting at the TV monitor on both sides.
Difficulties begin when telemedicine tries to establish contact at the doctor-patient level. There are a million questions at once. How to correctly identify the patient's identity? How to get objective analysis data and a clear clinical picture from a layman. Who will take the responsibility to make a final diagnosis and prescribe treatment without examining the patient properly and in the usual way?
The answer "no one", although it suggests itself, will be inaccurate. Today there are many services that exploit our laziness with you. Open a popular search engine, find the Health service, choose a photo of the doctor you like, click the "pay" button: five minutes, 500 rubles – and now you can ask your stupid question to get an equally stupid answer. Does it work if you're interested in something like "doctor, why is it itching here all the time"? And if the problem is more serious, then the only useful advice that a TV doctor will give you is to finally go to the doctor.
Does this mean that digital technologies are poorly applicable to medicine? Not at all. There are a lot of areas where real breakthroughs can be achieved with the help of innovations. Technologies should help to coordinate more effectively between different levels of the healthcare system, to establish interaction between departments when managing a patient at different stages of his treatment. Telemedicine is able to make more effective monitoring of the patient during his rehabilitation. In general, it can make medicine more patient-oriented, allowing the doctor to spend more time on the patient, and not on filling out paperwork, to lead him to full recovery. As one official said at a conference in Skolkovo, medicine will be digital, regardless of our desire. Another question is where we will be when this happens.
The Telemedforum was organized by the Skolkovo Innovation Foundation and the St. Petersburg company Unified Medical Portal.
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