A priority task of Russia’s national healthcare policy is increasing people’s life expectancy and combating premature mortality. The active use of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, helps move towards the goal, but it can also carry risks. These and other difficult issues were discussed at the Plenary Session «Future People: Challenges and Opportunities for Medicine of the 21st Century», which took place as part of the 13th St. Petersburg International Health Forum at the ExpoForum Convention and Exhibition Centre.

The tone of the discussion was set by Mikhail Murashko, Minister of Healthcare of the Russian Federation, who addressed the participants via video communication. He believes that the doctors, scientists and other healthcare professionals gathered at the Forum are united by one great goal – saving human life. And the main task here is strengthening the nation’s health, in order to improve life expectancy in not only quantitative, but also qualitative terms. He stressed that the proportion of Russians leading a healthy lifestyle is growing, and the use of alcohol and tobacco among teenagers is decreasing.

«Children born nowadays have already had a chance to live to the 22nd century. The proportion of the population aged 60 and over will increase, and this is a challenge to the healthcare system. We are on the verge of a revolution in longevity medicine», stated Mikhail Murashko.

For completing the tasks, it is needed to focus on the fight against chronic diseases, on their prevention, as early as possible detection and treatment, since they are the cause of premature mortality in most cases. «The focus should be on a human being», concluded the minister. «We need to move from treatment to active disease prevention».

Aleksander Beglov, Governor of St. Petersburg, who also addressed the audience via video communication, highly appreciated achievements of St. Petersburg in the field of healthcare. In his opinion, the city has already become our country’s medical capital, where not only compatriots but also foreign guests go to be treated, and developing this area is one of key priorities in the work of the government of St. Petersburg.

«We live in the era of tremendous changes, and horizons that we could only dream of before are opening up before us», told Batyr Berdyklychev, representative of the World Health Organization in Russia, the participants in the meeting.

Like Minister Mikhail Murashko, Batyr Berdyklychev called for combating the development of chronic diseases and noted that the growth in the number of elderly population is a global trend: by 2050, according to the WHO forecasts, the number of people aged 60 and over will have exceeded 2 billion people. So the task is creating conditions, under which a healthy state will be maintained throughout a person’s life, as noted the expert, and it is necessary to develop disease prevention and screening programs, telemedicine, and artificial intelligence, while not forgetting the accessibility of technology. «We cannot allow innovations to be the preserve of a privileged few. Our common duty is to make sure that achievements of science and technology work for people’s benefit and that medicine is not only technological, but also humane», declared Batyr Berdyklychev.

Bogdan Kotiv, Deputy Head of Kirov Military Medical Academy for Clinical Work, Major General of the Medical Service, greeted the audience on behalf of «the army of thousands of military doctors to be now at the SVO». He noted that this is an additional «medical and tactical» challenge for the doctors to be facing currently. This challenge has required bringing surgical care closer to the line of combat contact, creating mobile hospitals, and organizing uninterrupted air evacuation of the most serious patients to the best clinics in Russian cities. In particular, in St. Petersburg medical institutions, according to Bogdan Kotiv, the mortality rate of seriously injured people is less than 1%, despite the unprecedented severity of the injuries.

Andrey Sarana, Chairman of the St. Petersburg Health Committee and Director of St. Petersburg State University’s Medical Institute, spoke in his report how St. Petersburg is turning into the medical capital and fulfilling its mission to increase life expectancy. The city’s population is growing, reaching 5.6 million people; the number of births last year was 46.9 thousand. New medical facilities are being actively built: 20 of them appeared in 2024, and 21 more are planned to be commissioned in 2025. The pharmaceutical cluster is rapidly developing: besides other products, St. Petersburg companies produce unique biomedical cell-based products, for example, for treating Parkinson’s disease even at late stages, with new enterprises and laboratories to be established. The number of transplants is steadily growing, surgical robots operate in nine clinics, reproductive medicine technologies are developing, and artificial intelligence systems are being introduced on an increasing scale. Andrey Sarana shared that in St. Petersburg, life expectancy of 80 years is planned to be reached by 2030.

«St. Petersburg will always be a pioneer in the medical development», he promised.

Mental disorders are a difficult problem to cope with on the way to achieving the goals of slowing down aging. Svetlana Shport, CEO of the Serbsky National Medical Research Centre for Psychiatry and Narcology of the Ministry of Healthcare of the Russian Federation, called mental-health protection a key task for increasing life expectancy. The spread of schizophrenic and depressive disorders is growing, and if until a few years ago, these diseases were found mainly in low-income countries, now there is their increase in Europe and both Americas. Svetlana Shport is sure that early detection and diagnosis of mental disorders will help stop the trend.

For resolving the demographic issue, it is needed not only to slow down aging, but also to raise the birth rate and combat infant mortality. According to Dmitry Ivanov, Rector of St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University and Chief Neonatologist at the Ministry of Healthcare of the Russian Federation, in Russia, significant progress has been made in this area, and the effective system for protecting newborns’ health has been established. He stressed that Russia ranks first in the world in reducing infant mortality: there are only 3.4 deaths per thousand new births. Dmitry Ivanov demonstrated the graph showing that over the past 100 years, this indicator has fallen 70 times, steadily decreasing every year, and today, Russia has surpassed even the United States, not to mention all other countries. In some regions, the figure is even less than 1%. However, as Dmitry Ivanov noted, «it’s unreal to build a hospital with robots and high-quality obstetricians in every village», although there may also be serious cases in villages. The conclusion is that it is needed to improve the skills of nursing staff, nurses, and paramedics.

Introducing artificial intelligence into medical technologies was the subject of an interesting discussion at the Plenary Session. We cannot avoid the growing influence of AI on healthcare, but it must not upset the balance between benefits and risks, warned the rector of the Higher School of Healthcare Organization and Management Guzel Ulumbekova. The benefits of AI are obvious: they reduce the number of medical errors, save time, and increase research efficiency. But the risks are also high, it is first of all decreasing a doctor’s clinical thinking because of his/her getting used to relying on a machine. But medical situations can vary a lot depending on many factors, that’s why a universal algorithm is not always applicable. Guzel Ulumbekova pointed out that, following the results of the studies, the accuracy of the AI response is immediately halved from 80% to 40%, when parameters of a clinical situation change. Nevertheless, introducing AI is needed, but we must approach to this more carefully by creating long-term government programs, establishing a specialized department in the Ministry of Healthcare, strengthening the control and registration of AI models, improving the teaching staff’s qualifications, and amending the legislation.

Tatiana Chernigovskaya, Professor of St. Petersburg State University’s Department of General Linguistics, Doctor of Biological and Philological Sciences, offered to look at the problem of AI from an unusual angle. Neural networks, in her opinion, actually began competing with people by generating their own logic, incomprehensible to humans. They can regulate the behavior of people and even entire societies, and this means that we «have actually moved to another world». The use of AI leads to decreasing human cognitive abilities, despite the fact that the human brain is much more complex in its organization than any neural network.

«We need to slow down and think about what the purpose of human life in such a world is. What are we here for? How is artificial intelligence and human intelligence going to coexist?» asked Tatiana Chernigovskaya. For a person, this question, she believes, is now turning into an existential one.