Background
The project is a joint effort between Lappeenranta University of Technology and the Telemedicine Laboratory of Tampere University of Technology. The project aims to research the utilization, commercialization and development possibilities of Finnish health care processes and applications in Russia, especially in the St. Petersburg area. Most of the modern health care applications rely on infromation and communications technologies. The term telemedicine (telehealth, eHealth), simply refers to the utilization of ICT in health care, transferring and controlling medical data electronically.
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.
The project can be divided into two separate parts:
1) A wide research about the current state of Russian health care services and their future prospects
2) Identification of the opportunities for Finnish technology developers and other health care actors. Analytical comparisons of health care processes and technologies, analyzing the readiness for implementing new solutions.
Project duration: 1.12.2008 - 31.03.2010
Total budget: 228 000 € (136 800 € from TEKES)
Contact information:
Professor Kari Mäkelä
Tampere University of Technology, Telemedicine Laboratory
First.last@tut.fi
Researcher Raimo Miettinen
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Northern Dimension Research Centre
First.last@lut.fi