RIYADH — The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is steadily moving to build a digital health ecosystem, which is imperative in offering value-based care and population health management at a lower cost, according to Emmeline Roodenburg, Head of Healthcare, KPMG Saudi Arabia.

Digital healthcare technology is one of the keys for supporting Vision 2030 program, with the Ministry of Health aiming to have digital records for nearly 70 per cent of Saudi citizens by 2020. In addition, digital healthcare tools will further enhance the performance and productivity of healthcare providers, facilitating the delivery of high-quality services.

“As data begins to be gathered robustly on the prevalence of diseases and segmentation of patients becomes possible, proactive targeting of patients can be realized. Using technology to drive these interventions, such as digital behavioral management programs supplemented with offline care management systems will achieve better outcomes and better patient satisfaction,” she noted.

While the development of healthcare IoT applications in Saudi Arabia continues to gain pace, Roodenburg said the Kingdom still faces barriers on three fronts: technical, administrative, and legal.

"Technical barriers are the full implementation of health information systems that are automated and interoperable at the national level, between emerging clusters and providers within the clusters," Roodenburg said, stating “central coordination is the key”.

Since several countries in the world would like to press the ‘reset button’ when it comes to IoT healthcare implementation, Roodenburg believes Saudi Arabia actually has the opportunity to be the architect of a well-functioning system and needs to grab that chance with both hands.

However, administrative challenges, which are inevitable in any IoT implementation, should be attacked through cultural training and development of healthcare staff to adopt and promote the use of IoT especially with regards to patient care, she said.

“Legal barriers, as anywhere else in the world, need clear policies on data sharing, privacy and recovery, and backup plans on an information system and the robustness of those.”

According to Roodenburg, there should be no compromise on the selection for healthcare information systems in Saudi Arabia. .

“The trick is not to go for the simplest systems that are just good enough, but to go for the best new-generation systems that are fully interoperable - not just from the system point of view - but also from the patient perspective in how consumers of healthcare expect to interact with their health systems via their mobile phones and wearable and apps.”

Systems need the backbone and infrastructure to be robustly developed so machine learning, remote diagnostics and treatments can be superimposed, Roodenburg stated.

With healthcare being one of the main focus areas of Vision 2030, there is a move towards privatization aimed at increasing private healthcare expenditure from the current 25 per cent to 35 per cent of total expenditure by 2020.

The biggest contribution the private healthcare sector can make to future proof healthcare are topics such as investment in remote and point of care diagnostics and monitoring, offering different models of care like home multidisciplinary teams, technology-enabled care coordination of chronic comorbid conditions, investment in Artificial Intelligence and personalized medicine, digital pathology and at the high-end training and development of professionals, to be able to use robotic interventions and new treatment techniques.

"The government in return is going to have to fulfill its part to help create the right environment and payment mechanisms to allow this to happen, in collaboration through public-private partnerships," Roodenburg concluded. — SG