Technology & IT | Tuesday 29 October, 2019 2:01 pm |

All concerned parties in the region still focus on healthcare, concurrently with increasing technology usage in healthcare sectors. Several decades ago, patients’ medical records were accessed by searching in dark rooms stacked with papers, safes and external archives. There was no central location to access a particular file, which could lead to more errors and risks. Industry officials realized the need for new technology innovations to deliver connected healthcare services and address all patient care issues.

Saudi Health Ministry has been implementing, since May 2017, e-Health initiative paces, which aim to improve healthcare sector efficiency and effectiveness through IT and digital transformation, to achieve Saudi Vision 2030 goals.

“AI and technology provide healthcare organizations with more accurate information, better access to the right data at the right time, reduce operating costs in healthcare delivery, improve quality of its services, increase beneficiaries participation in healthcare process and improve service provider satisfaction”, said Eng. Thamer Alharbi, President of Microsoft Arabia, highlighting importance of advanced technology in upgrading healthcare providers performance.

Intelligent Healthcare 

Alharbi outlined five key factors that will lead to deliver intelligent healthcare. The first factor is “rapidly emerging technologies” as by 2020, on average of 1GB of health related data will be created daily per person. Secondly, “aging populations”, with 2 billion people in 2050 will be over 60 years old, representing an increase of 10% over today’s aging population. “Shortage of healthcare workers” is the third factor, 14 million healthcare worker positions will go unfilled in 2030 as the world experiences a global shortage of healthcare workers. The fourth factor is “growing cybersecurity threats”, $6.2 billion is expected to be lost due to data breaches to the health industry every year, leading to increased pressure in cybersecurity. The last factor is “increasing patient expectations” as 97% of patients have raised expectations around their healthcare, expecting every health institution to have access to their full medical history.

Alharbi stressed importance of technology to improve patient care by enabling care teams to communicate and collaborate in a single secure place, integrating data, clinical systems and electronic health records. Additionally, share knowledge easily and securely across health teams with advanced messaging features including priority notification smart camera and message delegation. He added also that care improvement can be achieved through coordinating activities of clinical personnel to deliver patient centric care leveraging the specialization of multidisciplinary teams and surfacing relevant insights, as well as, continuously monitor the patient’s condition by gathering data from remote devices to provide timely alerts, interventions and personalized treatment plans.

Experiments and Applications

“Microsoft technologies significantly reduced time to focus mainly on how to achieve best patient outcomes through AI, data analyses improving decision making process, automating and speeding up processes and saving overall costs”, said Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft Arabia, Rayan Zahid. 

He added that healthcare industry has been influenced by digital revolution as 84% of healthcare executives believe AI will revolutionize the way they gain information and determine best practices in operations management by comparing data from multiple facilities.

Zahid indicated that Microsoft recommended King Abdulaziz University Hospital (KAUH) to use Microsoft systems on its infrastructure with security solutions Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), to monitor hospital systems constantly for external and internal security threats. If a threat is detected, ATA sends an alarm in real time directly to the administrator and presents the results on the ATA console.