IfG.CC - The Institute for eGovernment

Telemedicine might become one of the main constituents to implement the priority national project ‘Health’ related to healthcare, Mikhail Natenzon, CEO of the company ‘National Telemedicine Agency’, says. He believes telemedicine is an effective instrument to improve the availability and quality of medicine assistance to public.

Russia has made a remarkable breakthrough in IT in the past few years. The “Electronic Government” Program is an ambitious project to improve paperwork and do away with queues in government offices. A portal of state services which was launched at the end of last year makes it possible to apply for a foreign passport, get a new driver’s license and obtain information from the real estate registry.

The Internet attracts people with its diversified information and accessibility. At present, one can visit the Internet even through his or her mobile telephone. Almost 70 percent of Russians use the Internet daily, and the leaders of the country play a key role in popularizing it.

Recently, news agencies reported Communications Minister Igor Shchegolev as saying that e-mail addresses can serve as an official identification like a passport, a drivers license, or a permanent residential address.

One of the government’s top priorities, he said, was to create a state information center to insure interdepartmental information exchange and access to the data of government information systems. “It is this system that will allow us to provide a wide range of government services to Russian citizens in electronic form, creating a single information system to span all government agencies, ministries and departments,” Ivanov said.

The news was announced in Moscow on Thursday, by the head of the elections commission, Vladimir Churov, who said the mobile technology doesn’t have to be too complicated for voting.

The Russian Technologies State Corporation,or Rostechnologii, has already set up a company there specializing in broadband Internet service, said Sergey Chemezov, head of the corporation.

"The e-mail service would be launched by the end of year and would be operated by Rostelecom a subsidiary of state-run telecom giant Svvyazinvest," Telecom Minster's aide Ilya Massukh was quoted as saying by CNews.ru IT news portal.

The service comes in addition to recently-introduced State Services Portal (SSP), that accepts online applications for a number of services provided by the government.

­The project, initiated by President Dmitry Medvedev in mid-October, was launched by the Public Committee of the President’s Supporters.

“This is a mechanism to receive feedback from citizens,” State Duma deputy Robert Shlegel told Izvestia daily. He said that everyone will be invited to join the extended government.

The e-Government project, which was approved by the Cabinet at a meeting Thursday, will increase efficiency and transfer the bulk of official bureaucracy online, IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said.

At a joint meeting of the Russian State Council and the Presidential Council for the Development of Information Society on December 23, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said a common policy will be set for the electronic provision of services for all agencies and regions.

The key instrument of forming the e-Government of Karelia is the Informatization of the Republic of Karelia in 2008-2012 regional target program. According to it, 23 information subsystems of the e-Government developed at the federal level and intended for automation of working processes in various fields of activity and aimed at maintenance of needs of the population and authorities in information exchange and electronic cooperation should be introduced by 2012.

Having addresses in the Cyrillic zone is not an attempt to follow fashion but a means to drive commerce. Andrei Vorobyov continues: "We`ve started accepting bids from companies on 12 May. The new rules of priority registration make the whole process much easier. We see that even those trademark owners, who already have addresses in Latin script, would like to be registered in the Cyrillic domain. We plan to accept preliminary bids in June."

The study of e-government’s relevance at the regional and municipal levels carried out by the Agency for Social Information (ASI) under the auspices of Russian e-Development Partnership (PRIOR) has produced the following results. In 2007 56.1% of respondents approved the idea of service provision by governmental bodies through the internet (53% in 2006). 16.1% were against the mentioned above idea, while in 2006 the index amounted to 30%. 500 St Petersburg residents over the age of 18 were questioned.

“The battle against corruption is one of the main goals of this effort,” said Andrei Lipov, director of the ministry’s department for information technology and informatization policy.

“If we can provide even a part of the services people need via an e-government system, we expect corruption associated with government services to citizens to go down,” he said.

"We must move toward switching to electronic interagency documentation," Sobyanin said. "By the end of the year, this problem should be solved in all ministries."

“The portal the way it is going to be launched on December 15 is only the first step. To begin with, these are not all the services. There will be 74 priority services. But with time it will regularly be updated to offer more and more functions,” the minister told Komsomolskaya Pravda radio on Monday.

“Financial control institutions have been established only in a third of all municipal entities,” the president said at a session of the council for the development of local self-government on Tuesday. He criticized the problem of an inefficient use of the local budgets. “Certainly, it is impossible and senseless to create such structures in all municipalities,” Medvedev believes. “But it is necessary to develop the e-government system with the control function and utmost transparency for the people,” the president believes. “This is the task of municipal authorities,” he added. “People should receive competent answers to the questions they are interested in,” the president believes.

It has been proposed that the new commission should coordinate the work of federal and regional executive bodies in respect of the following: determining a unified policy of developing and using information technologies in public governance, industries and the social sphere; devising and implementing measures aimed at expanding the use of information technologies in order to improve the quality and availability of public and municipal services rendered to organisations and the population; making the use of information technologies in the work of government agencies more effective; improving the effectiveness of inter-agency interaction and internal organisation of government bodies through the use of information and telecommunication technologies.