Background
The demand for health care services is constantly growing due to the ageing of populations. Current health care processes and applications need to be developed further to be able to provide health care services efficiently to those in need. A wide range of different telemedicine applications have been developed in Finland. Yet the specific research in this field is still somewhat limited to only a few research institutions. The Finnish health care application market is very small, but the issues and problems in health care global. New incentives and methods are needed to encourage wider international commercialization and co-operation between health care service providers and technology developers.
Russia’s health care sector has slowly started recovering from the problems that it has been faced with in the last 15 years. One of the biggest problems in Russia is the difficulty to provide health care services equally to its whole population. Russian health care specialists have noticed telemedicine applications as one solution and they have been tested quite successfully in Russia. As the living standard of Russians rapidly catches up with the western level and demand for better services increases, a leapfrog effect can be expected. In practice, in the coming years the local health care sector will skip some less efficient and more expensive technologies and move directly to more advanced ones. This will provide excellent possibilities for the Finnish actors for co-operation in application and process development.
This project is aiming at gathering together a research consortium of Finnish and Russian partners, which will together start larger scale research projects in the field of Telemedicine. Preliminary screening of the market potential of Russian health care sector is conducted and a meeting is arranged with the Russian university partners in St. Petersburg. The most importnat result of this project will be a larger joint research project.
Research period: 5/2008-11/2008
Contact information:
Researcher Raimo Miettinen
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Northern Dimension Research Centre
First.last@lut.fi