Today, digital transformation is not about implementing a new MIS or EMR. The main challenge for leaders of the medical market now is the manageability of the IT landscape: the ability to bring together disparate IT solutions, employees, and processes into a cohesive digital environment that operates efficiently.
The overwhelming majority of medical organizations face the same problems: medical and laboratory systems, telemedicine platforms, mobile applications, and AI modules exist separately, which leads to data duplication and the need for manual processing, while doctors and clinic administrative staff have to work simultaneously in several interfaces.
Our company interacts daily with hundreds of partner clinics within voluntary medical insurance programs and sends millions of letters of guarantee to medical organizations for service approval. Most such documents are still processed manually or require a long time for approvals due to the high workload on clinic administrative staff.
At the end of 2025, the company launched a unified ecosystem for seamless data exchange between the medical information systems of partner clinics, the insurer, and patients. The solution makes it possible to eliminate document duplication and, most importantly, accelerate the process of organizing medical care, minimizing delays for patients.
The workload on employees is growing because of the need for constant training in new technologies, while requirements for information security and the protection of patients' personal and medical data are evolving much faster than the IT landscape of medical organizations can adapt.
Among other things, one of the key barriers to automation is the shortage of IT specialists. Many medical organizations (we are not talking about large clinic chains) do not even have their own IT departments engaged in the development and implementation of information technologies — this function has been fully outsourced to external contractors, whose number can often reach 5 or more companies, making the process of managing clinics' IT landscape even more complicated, and sometimes impossible.
Focus of 2026
In 2026, medical organizations will move away from the strategy of implementing as many technical solutions or platforms as possible toward integrating all developments into a single manageable digital environment: medical, administrative, and HR. The focus will shift to manageability and operational efficiency. Clinics will prioritize measurable and understandable KPIs, process transparency, reduction of operational and medical errors, service quality control, and optimization of staff workload. Large-scale transformation projects will recede into the background.
What is the medical community discussing today?
· How to turn a set of digital solutions into a single manageable digital space;
· When AI will stop being an experiment for clinics and become a real diagnostic and treatment tool;
· How to strengthen the security and confidentiality of personal and medical data in the age of AI;
· How to ensure medical staff are trained to work in a digital environment amid staff shortages;
· How to assess the economic effect of healthcare digitalization, and when medical organizations will stop spending and finally start earning from digitalization.
The answers to these very questions should form the basis of the development strategy of medical institutions in 2026.
Artificial Intelligence and People at the Center of Digital Transformation
This year, only those medical institutions that move away from implementing a large number of boxed solutions, focus on integrating already implemented digital products, improving data quality and the uniformity of IT architecture, reducing manual labor, improving patient service quality, and increasing process transparency will be able to become digital leaders.
Undoubtedly, one of the key areas will remain artificial intelligence, which it is important to integrate properly into the medical and operational processes of clinics, taking into account the existing regulatory restrictions in the industry. Institutions will have to adapt to new federal registries and updated data transmission protocols. It is also important to comply with legal requirements in the field of healthcare, as well as to ensure adherence to confidentiality standards.
Ingosstrakh is actively implementing AI in voluntary medical insurance processes. The technology is used to analyze data from partner clinics, optimize the customer journey, and improve the efficiency of interaction between participants in the system. In addition, artificial intelligence is also used in the medical processes of the company's network of owned clinics.
At the same time, all solutions are implemented in mandatory compliance with the requirements of Federal Law No. 152-FZ "On Personal Data," which ensures reliable information protection and customer security.
The implementation of AI tools is impossible without close interaction with doctors. Medical personnel are a special category of people. Most often, they are skeptical of new digital tools, which is due both to their extremely high level of education and to healthy pragmatism aimed at protecting the patient's interests. Medicine is a field in which the cost of error is too high. Increasing loyalty and trust in new technologies is a major task for clinic management and deserves special attention.
In the struggle for digital leadership in medicine, it is important to remember that digital innovation is not about flashy presentations and beautiful words, but about reproducible results and saved lives.
Kseniya Ivashkevich,
Director for the Development of Digital Innovations
in medicine at Ingosstrakh