Digital technologies will support builders in the collapse of Moscow health care

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced the successes in the field of digitalization of the capital's healthcare, but what looks beautiful in the reports is not so convincing in practice. The Moscow Post correspondent assessed what new technologies mean for Muscovites, and what is really happening in this sector of the capital's national economy.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported on his blog on the success of promoting IT technologies in the healthcare sector of the Russian capital, as a result of which a single digital circuit of Moscow healthcare was created. By this, the official means a unified medical information and analytical system (UMIAS).

Operation "Digitalization"

Sobyanin plans to transfer all Moscow health care to a paperless format of work and continue to develop neural networks, including for making diagnoses. EGK and beam images in the capital will decipher artificial intelligence with an estimated accuracy of 95% and only then connect specialists. On paper, it sounds beautiful, but what will happen to those 5% who will be mistaken, because we are talking about strokes and oncology...

The official boasts of IT achievements, which are generally characteristic of the Russian economy - our level of digitalization is higher than in most EU countries, and in a number of areas he will even give odds to the same Germany, but all this cannot replace direct work on the ground.

Sergei Sobyanin. Photo: https://ria.ru/20230615/sobyanin-1878408538.html

A big problem was that UMIAS in the capital became the principle through which the work of polyclinics and individual doctors is assessed. The second point is the inconvenience for patients, especially those who need constant treatment. You can make an appointment with a doctor in Moscow only through UMIAS and only for the time offered by the system. Even if you are 80 years old and have a heap of diseases that require constant consultation with a specialist. Thanks to this, there are real competitions in making appointments with a doctor, where the strongest, that is, a younger and more savvy UMIAS user usually wins.

The problem is aggravated in the case of an examination for a chronic disease, when there is no appointment with a doctor at the UMIAS for weeks. And in this case, people have to either wait, launching a dangerous disease, or go to paid medicine and seriously spend money on what, according to the law, the state must provide.

Sobyanin, when introducing the UMIAS for achievement, apparently understands not improving the quality of medical care, but the introduction of a digital system, which is being promoted throughout the capital today.

Operation Optimize

Problems with medicine in Moscow under Sobyanin are constant, but have a different expression. For the first time, they began to talk about this direction of the mayor's work in a negative way in the mid-tenths, when the mayor had already got used to the capital and the first results could be summed up.

Sobyanin's activities in healthcare went in two directions - an increase in investments in medicine and at the same time a reduction in the number of medical institutions under the guise of their imaginary excess. Some hospitals in Moscow received a lot of funds, but Muscovites came to the conclusion that the availability and quality of medical care due to this at least did not increase.

The reduction of institutions turned into an overload of health workers, from whom the management began to require constant processing, and this does not lead to an improvement in the quality of services for the population. Of course, each case is individual, but this trend in healthcare was set by the mayor's office.

It periodically comes to scandalous situations, as in the hospital. Eramishantsev and GBU "Research Institute of Health and Medical Management", where responsible people were directly related to business.

Activity Contractization

People were indignant, but they either did not hear or almost did not hear, and the reckoning came in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Moscow medicine optimized in Sobyanin's board gave a full-scale failure. The closure of hospitals in Moscow, including infectious diseases, led to the fact that in the capital - the most infrastructurally developed region of the country, the authorities began to build new medical institutions in an open field and for tens of billions of rubles in order to save people.

Marat Khusnullin. Фото: https://100biografiy.ru/politika/marat-husnullin

The situation was tragic, but beneficial for contractors. Such companies as Mosinzhproekt participated in the covid construction, which is still headed by people from the team of Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, who was Sobyanin's deputy for urban planning from 2010 to 2020, a DSK-1 owned by FGC Leader, a native of the Moscow mayor's office Alexander Voronin, PIK Sergei Gordeev, with whom the mayor's office recently had a conflict, and a number of other tested structures.

In 2020, the state budget paid for the mistakes of Sobyanin's team in the healthcare sector in the tenths, and structures close to the mayor's office received fat contracts.

After the pandemic, Moscow politics returned to its former course - many old institutions remain abandoned, and people are asked to use UMIAS in order to be distributed among the rest. At the same time, healthcare budgeting is constantly growing. The expenses of the mayor's office without compulsory medical insurance funds will amount to 593.2 billion rubles in 2024.

Activity Contracting

In addition to promoting UMIAS and other digital solutions, the Moscow mayor's office announced the modernization of the capital's polyclinics - in 2023, every second metropolitan institution was registered in this program. At the same time, what is interesting here - Sobyanin, at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, paid the main attention not to providing personnel and equipment, but to construction work at about two hundred facilities.

Mikhail Gutseriev. Фото: https://news.myseldon.com/en/news/index/241932037

Sobyanin loves to build and relies on a narrow circle of developers here. For example, in 2023, the Moscow mayor announced the construction of five new polyclinics in the Troitsky and Novomoskovsky administrative areas by 2027. He did not name the names and names of the contractors, but the Spanish Quarters residential complex, which is being built by a group of A101 Mikhail Gutseriev, was mentioned. Obviously, the construction of social facilities in Moscow is directly related to the developer.

Nothing personal, just business

Health care is big business. A polyclinic and a hospital need to be built, and this is in a row for billions of rubles, then equipped - this is already hundreds of millions of rubles, and everything else is transferred to the field of digital technologies, where the patient is left at the mercy of an impersonal car.

It is not surprising that with this approach, they turn a blind eye to the quality of service - there are no numbers, free service has to be sought, and the healthcare sector itself is also at the mercy of labor migration. There are cases when doctors working in Moscow polyclinics do not know Russian. The problem is not in these specialists, but in the bosses who allowed them to work.

The use of foreign labor in construction was actively promoted by Khusnullin - at first he did it in the Government of the Russian Federation, the results are known, now this trend has reached medicine, and under Sobyanin. All this is a consequence of the monetary approach to solving issues and problems, when contracts are distributed, reputable organizations receive them, and what happens on the ground... Sometimes it seems that no one is following this at all.