Saint Petersburg’s Healthcare: How Data and Technology Are Shaping the Medicine of the Future

Saint Petersburg Builds the Medicine of the Future Today

Saint Petersburg is building the medicine of the future today. The city is not just implementing digital technologies — it is creating a unified ecosystem with the patient at its center. The foundation of this transformation has been large-scale government projects such as “Electronic Healthcare” and “Creation of a Unified Digital Healthcare Environment Based on the Unified State Health Information System (EGISZ)”. Thanks to these initiatives, the city now operates a digital twin of citizens’ health — a data array formed from more than 90 million structured electronic medical documents, which helps doctors make accurate diagnoses, managers make informed decisions, and patients actively manage their health.

A Unified System for Everyone

All medical care in the city is recorded in structured electronic medical documents (SEMD). Data is automatically transferred from medical information systems (MIS) of healthcare institutions to the Unified State Health Information System of Saint Petersburg (GIS “REGIZ”), and is also integrated with the federal system EGISZ.

Separate centralized services have been created for all key areas, including cardiology, oncology, preventive care, and maternity care.

Results That Speak for Themselves

Leadership: Saint Petersburg is among the leaders in implementing SEMD, having introduced 89 types of documents. By the end of 2024, more than 90 million SEMDs had been generated.

Scale of data: The REGIZ repository accumulates data on 492 million laboratory tests, 23 million instrumental examinations, and 276 million cases of medical care delivery.

Full automation: 100% of birth certificates, sick leave certificates, and other medical documents are issued electronically. The Preferential Drug Provision system has issued 3.1 million electronic prescriptions.

An Ecosystem of Services for All Participants

By 2024, the city had 40 full-scale electronic medical services, distributed for the convenience of key user groups:

20 — for patients

11 — for healthcare professionals

9 — for healthcare managers

Another significant achievement is the active integration of private clinics — 146 organizations are already connected, which makes the medical history of patients receiving care in different institutions complete and continuous.

The “Health of a Petersburg Resident” Portal

The central resource for providing medical services to city residents in digital form is the “Health of a Petersburg Resident” portal — a major strategic city project launched back in 2011.

Currently, more than 2 million users are registered on the platform — their number has doubled since 2021.

Through their personal account, patients have access to 32 digital services and sub-services, including:

• viewing medical history
• booking doctor appointments
• scheduling preventive medical examinations
• calling a doctor to the home
• searching for medicines and viewing preferential prescriptions
• maintaining a vaccination calendar
• sending feedback

and other services.

A key component of the platform is the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) — a source of aggregated information for each individual patient.

It contains the full history of visits to medical organizations, results of laboratory and instrumental examinations, issued prescriptions for preferential medicines, the patient’s personal vaccination calendar, and other useful information.

Among the most popular services are also the “Child’s Personal Account”, which allows parents to monitor their children’s health indicators, and the “Electronic Prescription” service.

The latter allows patients to receive preferential medicines at a pharmacy using a QR code, minimizing paper document circulation.

For healthcare managers, these tools provide opportunities to precisely monitor issued prescriptions, forecast procurement needs, and analyze data.

The Doctor and the Digital Assistant: A Unified Information Ecosystem

The integrated electronic medical record is available not only to patients but also to physicians.

A dedicated resource — the “Doctor’s Portal” — has been created for them. It aggregates all electronic medical documents created across all state medical organizations in Saint Petersburg.

This simplifies disease diagnosis, the prescription of laboratory and instrumental examinations, and ensures continuity of medical care across the region.

For example, a patient’s past illnesses are grouped by corresponding nosologies, while laboratory results are organized by type of analysis.

This approach makes it possible to analyze data on a patient’s health across various disease groups and better track the dynamics of health indicators.

Doctors also have access to signal markers regarding the patient’s health status, such as the presence of diabetes or the risk of developing acute coronary syndrome.

Intelligent Systems Supporting Physicians

The digital infrastructure has become a platform for implementing more advanced tools — clinical decision support systems (CDSS) based on artificial intelligence.

These solutions are already actively used in clinical practice.

For example, AI algorithms successfully assist in analyzing medical images:

• mammography images

• CT scans of the brain and chest organs

• X-ray and fluorography data

Their key task is to become a “second pair of eyes” for physicians.

They process vast amounts of visual data with extremely high speed and accuracy, highlighting suspicious areas, measuring pathological changes, and tracking their dynamics over time.

This minimizes the risk of missing subtle signs, especially when working with large volumes of examinations.

It is important to emphasize that these technologies are not designed to replace doctors, but to become reliable assistants.

They take on part of the labor-intensive analytical work, allowing specialists to focus on what matters most — a comprehensive assessment of the clinical picture, communication with the patient, and choosing the optimal treatment strategy.

Thus, the synergy between medical expertise and digital assistants is a natural step toward the medicine of the future — more personalized, efficient, and human-centered.

Registry Platform

The enormous volume of primary data accumulated in REGIZ in structured form provides tremendous opportunities for analytics.

Saint Petersburg has implemented the “Disease Registries” subsystem, which allows automated formation of nosological registries of various levels of complexity and patient control lists based on specified parameters, as well as visualization of analytical data.

This service helps healthcare managers forecast the epidemiological situation in the city, track patient routing and the workload of medical institutions, and identify patients requiring additional attention and supervision from physicians.

Currently, more than 56 registries have been created in the system, and more than 10 more are under development.

The data from the registry subsystem is actively used not only for healthcare management but also in the clinical practice of physicians in various medical fields.

For example, in 2024, a registry was created for patients who did not undergo scheduled tuberculosis screening.

As a result of additional proactive work carried out by healthcare professionals, the coverage rate of preventive tuberculosis examinations increased from 54.6% to 79.7%.

Similar projects are being implemented in cardiovascular surgery, gastroenterology, and other medical areas.

The registry platform is a “dashboard” for healthcare managers, showing the health of the entire city healthcare system in real time.

Digitalization of Healthcare in Saint Petersburg: Plans and Prospects

Access to the results of diagnostic examinations and medical prescriptions in electronic form has been ensured for all citizens, including through the Gosuslugi national portal.

Centralized monitoring of the distribution and use of medicines purchased with budget funds has also been organized.

A pilot service has been launched to inform citizens about the estimated arrival time of ambulance teams, as well as an online visualization service for emergency dispatches.

A system of specialized communication is being designed for groups such as people with hearing impairments and speech disorders.

For example, a patient who cannot communicate with an operator by voice will be able to type a message, which will be automatically voiced to the ambulance dispatcher, while the dispatcher’s voice will be converted into text.

The city has also launched and continues to develop analytical dashboards for the healthcare system, allowing managers to monitor factors such as:

• salaries of healthcare professionals
• staffing levels
• citizen requests
• preventive medical examinations
• preferential drug provision

The nearest plans for further development of healthcare digitalization in the city include the following key directions:

• developing new scenarios for the use of artificial intelligence technologies

• expanding information exchange with private medical organizations

• deepening analytical work with SEMD data and medical records

• expanding the possibilities for booking doctor appointments and conducting telemedicine consultations using the national messenger Max

Conclusion

The digital transformation of healthcare in Saint Petersburg is not merely about collecting data or launching pilot projects.

It is a fully developed ecosystem where technology serves one goal — to make healthcare more efficient, accessible, and personalized for every resident of the city.

Author: Andrey Dyukov

Commercial Director, Netrika Medicine (part of N3.Group and Tashir Medica)