Some Directions of Medical Informatics in Russia

Abstract

Israel Gelfand, one of the leaders of 20th century mathematics, devoted many years to biology and medical informatics. The directions, created by him, are not well known, but the main ideas are relevant even now. The ideology of the medical knowledge formalization was applied in developing by Michael Shifrin in Medical Information System of the Burdenko’s Neurosurgery Institute. Under directorship of Andrei Vorobiev (Gelfand’s disciple-physician), one of the largest healthcare informatizations of the 20th century was done: unified system introduced in most blood banks of the Russian Federation. Accompanying, obtaining, storing and distributing blood products “from the donor’s vein to the patient’s vein”, the National Standard for Labeling Blood Products and the Law on Donation (with the task of forming the Unified Transfusion Information Space) were done. The same team, led by mathematician Boris Zingerman, developed the Medical Information System of the National Research Hematology Center, which was conceived as a unified system for managing all functions of the institution (out-patients and in-patients clinics, blood bank, pharmacy, research, accounting, personnel department and administration). The system focused on the full electronic document circulation with a single identification of participants and objects (including information objects). The National Standard “Electronic Case History” was created with the concepts of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) first formulated as well as a number of other important definitions. The ideology of “Disease Image”, based on the graphic presentation of data and the presentation of all medical events (records) from the EMR on a single time axis became the realization of Gelfand’s idea of using physician experience for generation of intellectual algorithms in medical informatics.