Picture of the day: digest of the main news from July 3, 2025
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#1 The Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation presented an analysis of the expenditure of federal budget and compulsory medical insurance funds on the development of the medical rehabilitation system and specialized medical care in 2022-2024. According to the auditors, the rehabilitation system is not yet effective enough. The level of equipping clinics with modern rehabilitation equipment was affected by the fact that purchased equipment was idle , the low percentage of domestic products, and bureaucratic obstacles in tender procedures. Despite the almost twofold increase in compulsory medical insurance costs for medical rehabilitation - up to 83 billion rubles per year, the volume of state assignments in many regions, as the Accounts Chamber found out , is not enough. This is influenced by a combination of factors, including the lack of a methodology for determining the need for rehabilitation measures, as well as a shortage of specialized personnel, found in every third region.
#2 The Russian government has prepared a bill on the formation of a "supply-side economy". The implementation of the document's provisions is aimed at optimizing preferential tax conditions for doing business in special economic zones (SEZ) and priority development areas (PDAs). New residents of such entities will receive additional preferences to the existing benefits for business development. Participants in SEZs are often pharmaceutical and medical industry operators, while investors in medical centers and clusters can implement their projects in PDAs.
Exclusively
At the request of Vademecum, the Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare practice of the law firm VERBA LEGAL prepared an overview of the regulatory legal acts that came into force in June 2025 concerning the circulation of medicines and medical devices. In addition, the lawyers spoke about some thematic draft regulatory legal acts that are currently being developed. More details about these documents are in the digest .
Pharmaceutical business
The analytical company Cursor studied more than 13.7 thousand current, amended, excluded and expired registration certificates for medicines and analyzed the degree of localization of production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) included in the drugs from the list of vital and essential drugs. The company came to the conclusion that out of 862 INNs included in the thematic list, only 63% (547 API) are produced in Russia in a full cycle, 17% (143 names) are localized only up to the stage of secondary and tertiary packaging, and 6% (55 items) are purchased from foreign companies for the production of drugs in the country. Cursor found that 117 imported APIs included in the list are used to create finished dosage forms outside of Russia.
Artificial intelligence
Scientists from the University of Tübingen (Germany) analyzed 15 million abstracts of scientific texts on biomedical topics taken from the PubMed database and found characteristic traces of the use of ChatGPT and other large language models. The study showed that about 13.5% of abstracts for 2024 contain linguistic markers of AI generation. To measure the impact of large language models on written speech, the experts compared the actual frequency of word use in 2024 with predicted values.
New data
Scientists from the UK presented the results of an analysis of the Quality and Outcomes Framework, introduced in the country in 2004, in The British Medical Journal. It became one of the world's largest financial incentive programs for the effective work of doctors. The specialists came to the conclusion that support measures are most effective in the first year after their introduction, but their effectiveness decreases significantly over a three-year period. The abolition of incentive payments led to a decrease in the quality of medical care to initial indicators, and sometimes even below this level. The researchers also suggested that the criteria for the quality of medical care, not affected by government support measures, may be displaced from the area of interest of medical workers in favor of the criteria for which incentives are provided.
Criminal case
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Chuvash Republic reported that the court sentenced the deputy head of the Center for Resource Provision of State Healthcare Institutions of the regional Ministry of Health to six years in a strict regime penal colony. The official was found guilty under paragraph "c" of Part 5 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (acceptance of a bribe by an official in a large amount) and Part 3 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (fraud committed using official position). According to media reports, this is Ilya Gorbylev. The investigation and the court established that in October 2024, the official received a bribe of 200 thousand rubles from a representative of an unnamed company for facilitating the conclusion of a state contract for the major repairs of one of the buildings of the republican psychiatric hospital, "further patronage and connivance in its implementation."
Other news:
Orfan-Bio to Conduct Clinical Trial of Opdivo Analogue from BMS in Russia
Mishustin orders acceleration of adoption of law on platform economy
Novartis fails in Cosentyx clinical trial to expand drug indication
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