Today we will tell you about the specialist who is responsible for the digitalization of the hospital. Denis Shchelkonogov – Head of Gender Development and Technology. Despite the fact that he is a deeply technical person, he speaks lyrically about his work:
“Digitalization of a hospital is not about computers, it is about the doctor thinking about the patient, not about papers. Yes, we do not save people’s lives directly as doctors, but we monitor the infrastructure of their work, like electricians, for example, we ensure the vital activity of the hospital, its system. Even digitalization in banks and financial institutions is easier than in medicine, here health, legal responsibility, dozens of branches and thousands of processes per day intersect. A mistake in the bank is money, a mistake in medicine is a person.
Denis’s team has created electronic medical records, patient routing, digital appointments – all this reduces the time from admission to treatment.
– The most difficult thing in digitalization is not technology, but people. A doctor with 30 years of experience does not immediately trust the system. My task is to make sure that the digital tool becomes an ally for him, and not an obstacle. The next step is predictive analytics: a system that sees risks for the patient in advance. This is no longer automation – it is real AI in the service of medicine.
Denis Shchelkonogov asks for one thing, not to call all representatives of his profession – IT specialists.
-My work is not about heroism – it is about comfort and respect for people. But, like doctors who do not like everyone to be called doctors, we are against IT specialists. In our hierarchy there are people who maintain computers, work with hardware, there are system administrators, developers are even higher in rank, they think on the scale of the entire company’s work process. Therefore, it would be wrong to call everyone one word, universal and not offensive to programmers.
