From November 14 to 18, the Russian-Chinese International Forum on Innovative Cooperation in Molecular Medicine was held in China. Maria Girich and Оlga Magomedova, Researchers at the Gaidar Institute's International Best Practices Analysis Department, participated in the event. The Forum aims to develop a new roadmap for innovative collaboration in molecular medicine and to boost the sustainable development of global healthcare.
Maria Girich spoke at the National Research Institute of Nanotechnology Innovation in Guangzhou about barriers to medical service exports from Russia to China. She highlighted the challenges of telemedicine service exports. For example, in China, online telemedicine diagnostics are only available to medical institutions licensed in China, although B2B collaboration with foreign medical institutions is permitted through agreements.
However, Russian companies without licenses will not be authorized to provide services in China. Russian aggregators, such as SberZdorovye, will require an "internet hospital" license to provide telemedicine services, as well as integration with the provincial platform for overseeing online medical services, compliance with special information security rules, maintaining electronic medical records, and other requirements. Furthermore, online advertising requirements create additional restrictions for Russian digital healthcare: advertising of medical services targeted to China requires obtaining permission, which further complicates the promotion of Russian medical services to Chinese patients. Maria Girich also noted the need to introduce medical multiple visas for up to one year and to develop joint AI projects in medicine (for example, in the field of radiology, as China lacks specialists in this field).
Olga Magomedova spoke online, discussing the challenges facing AI developers accessing health data in Russia and China. Russia and China have adopted similar regulatory approaches to determining the status of health data, which affects developers' ability to use such data to train AI algorithms. Both countries require anonymization of health data before using it for research purposes, but this negatively impacts data quality. The expert emphasized that Russia and China are addressing this issue differently.
In Russia, the developers' access to high-quality health data is being addressed through experimental legal regimes, while in China, they try to solve it through private data partnerships between tech companies and hospitals, where developers use health data directly within the hospital's IT infrastructure. This in-hospital data access model reduces security risks related to health data.
To facilitate the development of such practices in Russia, Olga Magomedova recommended that national regulators develop standards and recommendations for data handling (e.g., security specifications for private information systems for healthcare organizations). Coordination assistance from regulators is also needed to address the issue of matching requests from developers for specific types of data with offers to get access to such data from data holders (e.g., a centralized platform for coordinating researchers on data accumulated by Russian healthcare organizations).