Lastly, more than 40% of the population smokes and alcohol-related deaths are a considerably higher problem still than in the US, where it’s bad enough.  Given the fact that it was a hearty 1 degree Fahrenheit during large portions of my trip, I can understand why they drink: to forget that they have turned into a human Otter Pop.  Now I know why they come in blue.  A funny side note: when I and my fellow American travelers told our Russian hosts that after the conference we were going to do two days of sight-seeing on foot (with a guide), they looked at us like insane asylum escapees.  Even our guide said we were “brave,” which I assume was his mistranslation of whatever the Russian word is for bat-shit crazy.  When the temperature drops below your shoe size, one might be advised to stay indoors.

Back to the topic at hand, there are some profound similarities between the US and Russian healthcare systems despite their different core funding streams, structures and cultural histories.  For instance, there is a lack of adequate primary care and an over-representation of specialists.  There is a growing trend to empower pharmacists and consumers are more and more people are using the pharmacy as a clinic for diagnostics and treatment.  Concierge medicine is a growing field as people figure, “hey, I’m paying for it anyway so I may as well get good service.” The medical system has focused more on throughput than outcome, and attitudes towards this are changing.  80% of medical costs are derived from an aging population rife with chronic disease due to poor eating habits, little exercise and a weak preventive health culture.  Diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease–the usual suspects in our system–are the same villains in theirs. Attempts to address chronic illnesses create accountable healthcare consumers and foster state-sponsored wellness initiatives are growing at a massive rate.

In Russia there is a raging debate about growing healthcare costs and what data is needed to induce hospitals and others to pay for new treatments.  The advent of inexpensive new technologies, like cheap sensors and smart phones and analytics, is driving the system to seek new ways of fostering patient monitoring, home diagnosis and treatment and better access to the right services at the right time.   There are laws that stand in the way of the some the potentially best innovations, particularly laws about practicing “cyber-medicine (aka on-line treatment by a physician) and liability laws.   Most common question raised when new products to address these demands were discussed?  “Who is going to pay?”  Sound familiar?  It did to me.

During my visit to Moscow there were two separate but related events, as I mentioned.  One was a mobile health business plan competition and the other a healthcare conference on digital health issues of interest to Russia and the US.  I am going to cover the first event in more detail in my next post and focus on the conference here.

The Skolkovo Foundation and the government convened the conference, entitled 2012 Health Technology: Opportunities in Transformation to bring Western perspectives and information to Russia while also showing the US representatives what opportunities the Russian market could offer to globally-focused businesses. At a time when the Russian government has made a concerted effort to reform, invest in and improve its healthcare system (sound familiar?), the conference focused on an exchange of innovation-related information in telemedicine, telemonitoring, mobile health self-diagnostics, and other topics in the part of the Venn diagram where IT meets medicine.