The digitalization of Moscow started in 2011 and since then the city has become one of the leaders in providing e-services for citizens, with more than 11m citizens using city services today.
Initially, we had to digitize the city management systems. A few years later we started to introduce e-services for citizens that became very popular. The main feature of e-services in Moscow is that they are being developed by DIT and therefore they have a similar interface, the same login system and all of the services are connected and can interact with each other. It makes it easier for citizens to use.
At the same time we provided opportunities for the development of mobile networks. Due to cheap internet access and huge coverage (99 percent of Moscow is covered by 4G) the penetration of smartphones exceeded 83 percent. So the citizens of Moscow were ready to use these services.
As for the services themselves, they seek to cover all the needs of citizens. They include the EMIAS medical portal, the Active Citizen portal that runs polls for citizens, the Moscow E-school and the portal of the mayor of Moscow, mos.ru. However, there are also services for tourists, complaints, crowdsourcing etc. I’d like to briefly introduce some of these services.
First of all, the EMIAS service for making online appointments in Moscow public clinics, thanks to which the average waiting time to see a doctor has been reduced to five minutes and 95 percent of prescriptions are now issued in electronic form. With the Moscow E-school, we are creating a high-tech environment to improve the quality of education in Moscow schools. There is also a well-known e-polling service called Active Citizen, which allows Muscovites to make decisions on urban development. Almost 2.3m citizens participate on the platform and about 4,000 decisions have already been implemented via this service. We have recently been developing Crowd.Mos where, in contrast to Active Citizen, people can independently suggest their own initiatives for the city.
As for the possibility of interaction, we are now working on a full integration of all services. For example, in the future, when the winter flu epidemic begins in the city, EMIAS will be able to notify all schoolchildren and their parents of the need for protection and vaccination. All our services will form a single network aimed at helping citizens in a variety of situations. And finally, the mos.ru portal, which is a platform that aggregates all e-services for citizens in one place, as well as providing the latest news about the life of the capital. Mos.ru allows citizens to understand which e-services exist and how they can be received, which saves them time.
One of our aims is to save time for people and this is something that Moscow’s services can do. In our case, speed means comfort. Already, the introduction of EMIAS is saving doctors up to two million hours per year. Making life more comfortable for citizens implies that the city provides services to residents at all levels. Before the digitalization started, people had to spend a lot of time to use city services and go to different institutions but now they are all available online. Last year, we reached 170bn visits to e-government services and $ 1.5bn in payments were processed.
But for us, things don’t end with the provision of basic services. We are striving to add specific new services in accordance with the requests of citizens. For example, in summer, free sports activities with coaches and equipment are now available in Moscow parks for registered users. We are now working on responding to all relevant and adequate needs of people because this approach allows us to boost awareness and the desire to improve in people themselves. In this way, the city itself, in a sense, is becoming a service for citizens - and our aim is to make sure that this is a high-quality service.