Public healthcare systems typically focus on providing quality, effective, fair, affordable and accessible healthcare to the public, the majority of these systems focus on the delivery of these goals while, in many cases, compromise on the digitalization of their processes as a trade-off between affordability and quality. In essence, the ongoing process of healthcare digitalization have faced normative judgments from the public healthcare decision makers, influencing the adoption of the digital norms. Another factor influencing this digitalization is the lack of evidence to how the digital health services contribute to the public healthcare system goals in an optimal at the organizational and operational level.

Honing down to our region, countries like UAE, KSA, Qatar and Kuwait have already put in place a digital transformation framework for their healthcare systems. Abu Dhabi Department of Health (DoH) have recognized the role of technology and innovation in improving the delivery of care, the thinking started to shift since 2018. However, with challenges including centralization of services and activities, strict regulations and policies, population healthcare data stored in a black box, and finally the absence of digital and technology experts in the healthcare sector, all have affected the broader preparation of the healthcare system to be able absorb the digital transformation faster.

COVID-19 leading the way to a digital world, the exceptional acceleration:
The healthcare sector has been facing a multifaceted challenge, one being the fight against the disease outbreak, while maintain the populations’ regular care, in addition to other economic challenges resulted from this pandemic.

In the UAE, Given the chronic health conditions and aging population, the focus is on two fronts for care delivery – prevention before hospitalization, and post-acute care in a step down approach to ensure monitored recovery in cheaper settings, outside of hospitals. This has led the healthcare regulators to take an immediate step and around the clock decisions to facilitate some law tweaks and accessions to accelerate the adoption of some technologies:

1. Telemedicine is the way moving forward, Remote and virtual doctor visits are picking up steam:
   o A spike in Telehealth usage for patient monitoring, especially those with chronic diseases and also diagnose and detect early symptoms. Telemedicine will become a mean to improve patient health and wellness. One thing to keep in mind is the additional data produced here which must be integrated into the larger health records. Tapping into serious data management solutions will be crucial to extract information from this data.
   o In UAE: Telemedicine efforts in UAE have taken place in the last few years led by Mubadala, however challenges such as regulations, long approvals points, cross borders challenges, all hindered the scalability of it in this part of the world.
   o The opportunity: Despite all challenges facing Telehealth in UAE, DoH is realizing that it is really important to develop a framework for it here. DoH is now supporting platforms that are setting up in UAE to provide online services such as doctor bookings and online consultations and its planning to develop its own Telemedicine platform offering their public health services in SEHA.
   o the can deliver healthcare management platforms at the same time optimize and keep up with the population data that will be produced to develop
2. Artificial intelligence your first doctor:
   • Lots of AI and machine learning startups are bringing great value to the healthcare industry, by providing innovative ways to diagnose diseases, personalized treatment plans, medical research, and drug discovery and increase operational efficiency during peaks in hospitals.
   • In UAE: UAE is taking bold steps to be the frontier in AI and how its infusion to the different sectors and industry, forming ministry of AI, AI University and very recently put tougher an AI strategy to develop the healthcare sector. In 2019 Abu Dhabi under The DoH launched the AI Lab help foster an organic healthcare environment while develop the right infrastructure to bring and deploy AI applications locally with a focus on focusing on wellness and prevention, chronic disease management, clinical care, and regulatory management. Three programs were launched today:
   o My Wellness coach: a UAE specific wellness platform that leverages the power of AI to drive improved standards in preventative care
   o Cognitive virtual assistant: To enhance Abu Dhabi’s healthcare presence and response for users seeking information on the licensing process. Working with the AI lab, the licensing department aimed to set up an online cognitive digital virtual assistant via its internet portal, in order to answer the majority of these repetitive queries and relieve the pressure on the contact center, as well as generate an improved experience for its users.
   o COVID-19 AI Symptom Checker: Injazat and The DoH developed a simple online tool using artificial intelligence to first check symptoms and then connect patients to the appropriate medical services to detect COVID-19 cases
   • The opportunity: DoH is partnering with Abu Dhabi Digital Authority and Digital 14 to expand the above platforms to a full-fledged systems for all kind of diseases and symptoms, and eventually develop a research center that will produce intelligent researches on the population health diseases and trends, we have discussed sourcing startups from our portfolio and network that have capabilities in Analytics, Big Data, Machine Learning and Information Technology to help and guide in accelerating this development.
3. Health Information Exchange platform:
   • The more information healthcare providers have about the population, the more accurate their predictability capability becomes, and the more big data companies can start using this knowledge to predict when people will get sick, health trends, risks and eventually utilize the information produced to develop preventative healthcare measures for the population.
   • In UAE: One challenge a lot of the global health organization is access to public data due to many challenges related to regulations, decentralizations or lack of developed the right infrastructure that link data and follow individual patient journey. This challenge was also a major factor to the absence of advanced healthcare intelligence research and innovation in this field. Abu Dhabi latched Malaffi “My file” the lead by Injazat and The DoH, to connect over 2,000 public and private healthcare providers in Abu Dhabi, the database contains around up to five years of demographic and clinical data for 2.3 million patients from the four providers’ electronic health record systems. In the next phase.
   • The opportunity: As other hospitals joining the Malaffi’s platform, more information will be added to the platform, and a patient portal and analytics services are expected to be rolled out next year. Ventures portfolio can be positioned well to provide their services here. Innovaccer is a strong candidate to develop the exchange portal and the management platform. InCountry received interest from DoH to support vendors added to Malaffi to comply with the data localization regulation. KSA has also started putting the same strategy in place, further health information exchanges developed in the region
4. IT infrastructure readiness:
   • There’s no doubt that healthcare provision as we know is not going to be the same post this pandemic. All the technologies mentioned above present a new world OF accessibility to doctors and care. Traditional healthcare providers that aren’t adopting cutting edge IT solutions and infrastructures will eventually face capacity challenges when adopting the technology enabled solutions, these include quality, reliability, data overload, privacy and security issues:
   o Healthcare providers have moved from a centralized datacenter model to a decentralized client server networks to eventually the cloud. With AI and data processing healthcare providers have to make the decision between running a multiple data centers (considering costs associated with it), do perhaps move their machine learning on a cloud,
   o Cyber security is a growing aspect of this development, data being stored cloud and in exchange platforms accessed by many providers, this increases the cyber threats. Cyber security measures has to be taken to the next level.
   o Telemedicine adaption, high quality healthcare provision in underserved areas and high data processing capabilities all requiring a high-quality network for healthcare providers. That is ensured by adopting a high-quality network for healthcare providers
   • In UAE: Abu Dhabi is creating a vehicle co-managed by Digital14 to be the custodian for everything digital in health domain, they will start by revamping the technology infrastructure and also support the innovation mandate of UAE’s healthcare sector
   • The opportunity: the digital transformation vehicle, will connect all legacy system an upgrade their capabilities across all the public healthcare providers under SEHA to tackle digital health transformation execution.