Healthcare sector growth fuels IBM’s expansion in Russia

IBM says that several hospitals and clinics from Russia's rapidly evolving regions outside of Moscow and St Petersburg are tying up with it to modernise infrastructure and improve patient care.

It said a number of healthcare providers such as the Hospital of Murom Railway Station, the Clinic of Novosibirsk Institute of Blood Circulation Pathology in Siberia and the Emergency Hospital of Petrozavodsk have asked it to provide new information management systems giving doctors and medical staff rapid access to medical data and reducing waiting time for patients.

According to research from VCIOM (Russia Public Opinion Research Center), 33 per cent of Russians prefer to use self-treatment instead of turning to professional medical care due to insufficient healthcare services especially in some of Russia's more remote regions where often curable and manageable diseases often go unchecked and untreated. For that reason, the Russian government is running a special programme for healthcare modernisation across the country.

As part of its geographic expansion initiative, IBM is actively expanding its business operations in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and healthcare is emerging as one of the sectors driving IT growth across the region.

"Technology has a significant role to play in the transformation of healthcare services across Russia especially in Russia's rapidly evolving regions,'' said Kirill Korniliev, country general manager, IBM Russia / CIS. ''Not only does it improve access to critical medical information and improve decision making, it also helps to increase the efficiency of services and reduce patient waiting time. The digitization of core infrastructure is the first step towards intelligent medicine in Russia. The next step is the use of analytics to better understand information helping to mitigate the risk of medical errors.''

IBM has 14 offices across the region including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Rostov-on-Don, Kazan, Ufa, Kiev and Dnipropetrovsk (Ukraine), Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Tashkent (Uzbekistan).