At the end of January 2021, the federal law on digital sandboxes came into force, which was adopted as part of the Digital Economy national program. He created the necessary ground for the introduction of new technologies in the context of legal restrictions. The law established the procedure for establishing experimental regimes in the field of digital innovation, securing the possibility of applying special regulation that differs from the general one.
However, in order for this law to work in full force, it is necessary to adopt a companion law. The bill submitted by the government to the State Duma in mid-March is aimed at introducing the necessary changes in various areas of legislation. The bill proposes to consolidate the ability to change the mandatory requirements provided for in sectoral laws, a special program of the experimental legal regime, which will be approved by the government.
The proposed amendments will make possible a more dynamic development of artificial intelligence technologies in the healthcare sector. Currently, information about the patient's health belongs to special categories of personal data, the processing of which is not allowed, with the exception of certain cases, in addition, there is a prohibition on the disclosure of information that is a medical secret. Its safety is one of the key issues in medical ethics, because in order to obtain an objective diagnosis and treatment, the patient entrusts the doctor with many details of his private life. The development of artificial intelligence models, including the training of neural networks, is possible only on the basis of large amounts of information, but, taking into account the above legal restrictions, it is impossible to legally process information about the health status of patients for the indicated purposes. It is proposed to overcome these obstacles by consolidating the possibility of working with anonymized personal data. The collected anonymized data will allow for the aggregation, processing and analytics of medical data for insurance, pharmaceutical companies and pharmacy chains.
The changes will make it possible to predict the trajectory of the development of chronic diseases, to form a full-fledged picture of the incidence of the population, as well as to build population statistics, which is especially important during the period of the onset of quarantine restrictions.
The Canadian health monitoring platform BlueDot can be cited as a successful example of the use of artificial intelligence technologies to generate a morbidity map. This system tracks various diseases around the world and it was she who reported the outbreak of “unusual pneumonia” in Wuhan. Using a machine learning algorithm, the platform analyzes news reports, blogs, social networks with information about infectious diseases, satellite and airline data, as well as a large array of other necessary information. Thanks to the continuous analysis of “big data”, the system enables the relevant authorities to quickly receive information about the spread of infections and take the necessary measures.
At the same time, given the sensitivity of health data, an important enforcement challenge will be to control data anonymization technology.
Depersonalization is ensured by replacing personal data of citizens with special identifiers, as well as by reducing the list of processed information, generalizing it and dividing it into component parts. In the event that the aforementioned draft law is adopted and new technical means appear in the state administration, which make it possible to automatically depersonalize personal data, it seems important at the level of by-laws to consider issues of their mandatory attestation and certification by the relevant authority, as well as the conduct of regular control over them. supervisory activities.
The authors of the bill also propose to consolidate the possibility of introducing features in state registration and quality assessment of medical devices, as well as in the provision of medical care within the framework of clinical approbation. This will expand the use of artificial intelligence for medical purposes. It will become possible to use “computer vision” for the analysis of CT / MRI images, which will help the doctor to identify diseases in an automatic mode, including such as lung cancer, breast cancer. It will be possible to analyze the iris scans to assess the risks of developing cardiovascular diseases, as well as automatically screen the ECG results for the detection of atrial fibrillation. Very often, doctors prescribe patients to wear a heart monitor for a long time, which subsequently entails the need for the doctor to check the results of the study “manually”. After making changes, the specified procedure can be “entrusted” to artificial intelligence.
The bill proposes to provide for the possibility of establishing specific features in terms of fulfilling the requirements of the current aviation legislation. These changes will help the development of drone companies for the transport of various goods, such as food or pharmaceutical goods, as well as personal protective equipment, the speed of delivery of which is especially important when it comes to hard-to-reach or remote areas. It is worth noting separately the potential effectiveness of using this type of contactless delivery in the event of a repetition of the pandemic history. At the same time, attention should be paid to the safety of using drones.
The proposed bill will allow the government to more quickly regulate the implementation of digital products and services without making amendments to federal laws, and therefore without going through lengthy bureaucratic procedures in the State Duma and the Federation Council. Such a mechanism of work will allow companies to more actively implement innovative solutions, as well as “predict” the activities of government bodies in making regulatory decisions in the field of innovation.
