Healthcare issues are traditionally in the focus of the Northern Dimension Business Council (NDBC) which was created to involve and integrate companies to be a part of the Northern Dimension policy and to provide a platform for the dialogue between business and government structures.

The purpose of the Round Table on healthcare titled “Digitalisation of healthcare: trends and challenges” was to discuss the importance of digital technologies in improving healthcare systems, to analyze the main challenges to the introduction of digital technologies and the ways to overcome them, to consider the examples of regional healthcare digitalization programs and of effective technological collaboration in developing solutions for the digital healthcare ecosystem.

 

Yana Kotukhova, Chairperson of the AEB Health & Pharmaceuticals Committee; EAEU Governmental Affairs Director, Servier, and Stanislav Naumov, Chairman of the Board of the Association of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of the Eurasian Economic Union, co-chaired the Round Table. 

The event gathered representatives of Russia’s regional authorities, European Commission, Northern Dimension Partnership, business and expert communities. Igor Vasiliev, Governor of Kirov Region, opened the event with a report on the implementation of regional programs of healthcare digitalization. Other speakers’ interventions focused on various aspects of healthcare digitalization, such as needs and gaps in providing remote healthcare services, the impact of the patient community in overcoming barriers to innovation in healthcare, the promotion of responsible self-care culture, the importance of technological collaboration and digital ecosystem partnerships, the potential of digital technologies in ensuring patients’ centricity, increasing the quality of medical help and the efficiency of the healthcare system as a whole.

Following the discussion, participants elaborated the Round Table resolution which includes the recommendation to strengthen and further develop the international cooperation within the Northern Dimension Partnership in Health and Wellbeing in the sphere of harmonizing and implementing uniform standards of digital technologies in healthcare, as well as increasing digital literacy of socially vulnerable segments of the population in this area.