Through the visionary lens | Empowering patients through digital technologies

Dr. Baher Al Hakim, CEO of Medicus AI, spoke with Muhammad Siddiqui, Chief Information Officer at the International Medical Center. A health futurist, with over 20 years of experience in managing complex IT systems, Muhammad shared his thoughts on developing patient empowerment through digital personalization and engagement tools.

Please introduce yourself…

I am the Chief Information Officer at the International Medical Center. My team is working on moving our patients from an offline, infrequent, episodic ‘sick care’ relationship with IMC to a highly engaged digital relationship in which we’re helping our patients improve their health on a daily basis.

We’re doing this through digital convenience, personalization, and engagement tools we’ve invested in and built. We’re creating the same convenience patients see in the rest of their digital lives via online scheduling, video visits, and digital engagement platforms.

How is technology changing the hospital-patient relationship? How does this differ in Saudi Arabia, and what unique opportunities are there in this market?

Tech is certainly redefining the way patient-doctor interacts, monitor, diagnose, and receive treatment. And this is driven by the drive for more accuracy and efficiency powered by data.

Saudi Arabia is no different; it is the largest healthcare market in GCC with around 32m population with a large and growing young age group.

Consequently, there has been a consistently growing demand for pediatrics, gynecology services relating to mother and childcare alongside an increase in lifestyle diseases.

Historically, the public sector has been the largest provider for services, with growing income and young population the shift has been towards ‘fee for quality’ not just service. There are opportunities to provide both curative and preventative services/products for age group 20–40 as planning for wellness is very crucial at this age and also managing chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular, hypertension etc. With Covid-19, the opportunities and challenges are quite different, there is a need for tele-health services since patients are generally avoiding hospitals, lockdown in certain hours, but still we have not yet seen a drastic shift towards telehealth adoption despite complimenting it with home health services. Perhaps, among other reasons, patients are incredibly new to tele-health and many healthcare organizations did not embed a comprehensive remote patient monitoring system with telehealth services as yet.

Employing real time tech is crucial to empower patients to be a part of their medical journey. It applies well in treating chronic diseases where it’s difficult to manage, treat and engagement of multiple physician is required.

Perhaps there are opportunities to amend the delivery model and this can be done through remote patient monitoring and wearable tech/devices as patients certainly play a crucial role in managing, and even reversing chronic diseases as we know most chronic disease are associated with diet, lifestyle, environment and behavior.

As for healthcare professionals, these devices and technology are new as well — so there is a need for healthcare professionals, in saudi like everywhere else, to adopt and shift to the new, inevitable paradigm. On the other side, it empowers us, as healthcare facilities with real time, granular data, continuous monitoring and improve our efficiency and delivery model. Inevitably, it’s up to healthcare facilities to explore and micro innovate in multiple areas using tech and remote tech specifically.

IMC has also been an advocate for holistic approach to health and what remote monitoring technology and devices would allow us is to have a holistic approach to patient data, records for vital signs and markers and patient metric this would help caregivers manage co- morbid conditions in chronically ill patients by understanding the progression of diseases better and also provide access to cross specialty of data.

When you think of your business and industry in the next 5 years as a result of new technologies, and what do you think will have changed?

Every industry goes through a transition, all have to adapt and evolve as per the ongoing trends and never ending competition.

The entire healthcare ecosystem is going through a transition and evolving using current technologies keeping patients and consumers in mind.

In next 5 years, I see not only hospitals but the entire healthcare ecosystem adopting an approach to provide best patient experience to consumers at affordable rates at any given point of time. We will be looking at more personalized care, deeper Artificial Intelligence infusion, workflow in hospital that mirrors more of consumer technology, more usage of smarter devices to deliver care — phones, smart watches, and smart devices are just to name a few.

From where you sit, what do you believe the hospital of the future will look like?

I see IMC or any other hospital focusing more on providing integrated patient-centric care, which will be data driven and with clear quality measures. Hospitals will be expanding outpatient and remote services in various regions within Saudi to cover a wider population with the same quality of care in mega cities , also, rather than providing patients access to healthcare, aim of future hospitals would be to provide healthcare access to patients in their homes.

Hospitals will be focusing on:

• Lowering overall treatment cost and enhance patient experience
• Providing innovative ways of providing care to patients
• Focus more on standardizing data and using good analytics tool to help hospitals to take better decisions

What were the key challenges you faced in bringing innovation to your hospital?

Any hospital thinking to innovate using technology needs to change its mindset, where they should realize that without using upcoming technology and trends it is difficult to achieve your hospital’s vision and mission.

I faced challenges not changing the mindset but the time required to change the mindsets. As it does not change in days or weeks, you have to show continuous outcomes, the value it brings to the organization and impact it’s having on patients & employees.

And finally, why did you choose to work with Medicus to bring innovation to IMC?

Medicus has a proven track record of helping hospitals and producing successful outcomes. You align your thoughts around vision and mission of the organization and assist them in achieving their goals.

Disclaimer: Medicus AI has been working with the International Medical Center to help drive its innovation agenda forward.

About the International Medical Center

For more information about the International Medical Center, visit https://www.imc.med.sa/en/about-us