Dear Colleagues and Group Members,

This is a monthly update with my selection of highlights at the end of January on medical device regulation changes across Russia:

1. Cancellation of “old” forms of Medical Device Registration Certificates.
On 1 January 2017, Russia applied a deadline for the replacement of old forms of registration certificates for medical devices. Despite the fact that this deadline was set and became known four years ago, and the administrative procedure of the replacement was relatively simple (compared to the registration process), several sources have reported a number of cases when medical device companies did not replace their licences in time and for this reason, shipments of products into Russia during the first days of 2017 were stopped. To date, no statistics about the numbers of replacements have been officially published.
The question today is about the regulatory status of medical devices with old forms of “non-replaced” registration certificates which had already been imported into Russia before 2017 – it is unclear if such products can be legally commercialised.
At the same time, it is known that a possible extension of this deadline until 2021 has been suggested, together with other amendments under the current medical device registration rules in Russia. These are now still under the consideration of the Russian government. At the end of the day 30 January, the decision on this consideration has still not been published, so today still such scenario is not excluded.

2.New List of Medical Devices with 0% Value Added Tax
In the first days of January 2017, the Russian government published Resolution #1518 (link in Russian), which amended the list of medical products which were not subject to value added tax (VAT) in Russia. The previous version of the list was published in October 2015.
The new version of the list (link in Russian) contains 45 types of medical products separated into three parts: medical devices, optical lenses and rehabilitation equipment. Medical devices are classified using both “old” all-Russia Product Classification – OKP (for medical devices registered before 2017) and “new” OKPD-2 classification systems.
It should be recalled, that according to articles 149 and 150 of the Russian Tax Code (link in Russian), imports of registered medical devices to Russia should be exempted from VAT in distinction of 10% or 18% for other (medical) products.

3.Request to Report Data for Implantable Medical Devices
At the end of December 2016, the Russian medical device regulator Roszdravnadzor released a letter (link in Russian) aimed at manufacturers of implantable medical devices in Russia and requested them to report data, together with providing customs and finance documentation, for the period from 1 January until 31 December 2016 for the purpose of calculating “weighted-average” prices for each type of implant included in the list of medical devices subject to state healthcare programmes (link in Russian). According to the document, information should be reported using an electronic system, together with hard copies, by 15 March 2017.
The price regulation of medical devices from the list was set in Resolution #1517 at the end of 2015, but the deadline for its implementation has been postponed until the middle of 2017.

Thank you for following this blog! My objective here is to make Russian and Eurasian medical device regulations clearer. You can also follow my news on Twitter @MedDevRus