Healthcare • Forum
Saudi Arabia is moving forward to ensure healthcare institutions provide high-quality service and medication and an excellent patient experience at reasonable rates.
Ahmed al Bader
FOUNDER & CEO, SIHATECH
OUR OPERATIONS are expanding now, and we have been changing our business model to focus on homecare. We decided to mobilize healthcare practitioners and the healthcare system and build a homecare team that is highly optimized. This team takes care of post-operation procedures and reduces the need for extra hospitalization by two or three nights, transferring this responsibility to the homecare company for elective and post-op procedures and physiotherapy. This helps those who do not want to stay in hospitals for prolonged periods, enabling them to get the proper treatment at home and continue living their lives. We also adopted the digital healthcare business model, which we were already successful in. We also decided to build an actual healthcare delivery model. We seek to become a highly optimized provider of healthcare at home.
Saad Sabbah GENERAL MANAGER, AS SALAMA HOSPITAL
AS SALAMA HOSPITAL has a great team of doctors. More and more Saudi doctors are entering the market, and we want to attract them here. We have three notable Saudi doctors here already. We are renowned for providing great nursing care. We also have a large geriatric and long-term center operating for more than 30 years in this field. We are a reference in the region for this service and have trained personnel on how to handle the elderly. We cater to almost all levels of care. In addition, our physicians have been serving this region, country, and hospital for a long time. As we are a general hospital, we do not specialize in any particular field. Our patients tend to come from the middle- and lower-income classes. The Ministry of Health helps us with directives and ensures that our compliance and readiness in terms of COVID-19 are at a solid level. We also do our own assessments and check the business continuity plan. We are implementing plans as needed, on top of the requirements from the Ministry of Health.
Faisal Dial CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRIES (NCPI)
NCPI HAS BEEN a focal point, with many activities in progress to protect people against the impact of COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia. Everyone in Saudi Arabia needs to receive their usual medications, and such medications must remain available. NCPI, which oversees the local manufacturing of pharmaceutical products in Saudi Arabia, is doing its best to make this happen. We do not have any shortages of locally manufactured medicines, and we try to cover the shortages of imported medicines as well. In the wake of COVID-19, many countries started to block the export of medicines or medical supplies, while Saudi Arabia is now exporting medicines to other countries. This has become possible with the support of the public and private sectors, and this improves the situation in terms of the availability of medicine, which is our main task in NCPI. We are also in close contact with Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA), which has published a list of medicines that have few alternatives and are in short supply.
Muhammad Siddiqui CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CENTER (IMC)
DIGITALIZATION HELPED ENSURE accessibility and availability of services during COVID-19. The two key things that we focused on are accessibility and convenience for our patients during COVID-19. We have an amazing mobile app that is ranked highest in the Kingdom at this point. Our patients are able to book an appointment via WhatsApp, chatbot, a patient portal, or a mobile app, look up their radiological or blood records in a way that they understand as we have utilized smart reporting tools, use our AI symptom checker to explore COVID-19 symptoms without visiting the facility, seek a pharmacy or physicians, or make a virtual visit, all on their mobile phones. They can make payment online as well for the virtual visit. The telehealth product was an amazing success on the physician’s side. We developed our telehealth product in 12 days during COVID-19 that we rolled out to 1,200 physicians with an integrated telehealth solution.