Dubai: All of Dubai’s hospitals will be onboarded onto a single electronic medical file by year end.
Dubai Health Authority (DHA) announced this milestone at the ongoing Gitex Global exhibition, which is taking place at the Dubai World Trade Centre.
For patients, this means that they will have one electronic medical file with all their medical reports safety stored. When the patient moves from one facility to another, the medical file will follow.
The project is linked to UAE’s Riyati initiative, ensuring that in future every person in the UAE has one electronic medical file. Additionally, Nabidh will also provide evidence-based gold standard data for public health and wellbeing initiatives to enhance population health and disease prevention.
The initiative enhances efficiency, minimises the risk of medical errors, and empowers patients and healthcare providers, DHA said.
9 million records
By the end of this year, due to Nabidh and UAE’s Riyati project, clinicians across Dubai will be able to access over 9 million unified medical records by 37,748 clinicians and 454 healthcare facilities across Dubai.
Awadh Seghayer Al Ketbi, Director-General, DHA, said: “ In order to serve patients better, enhance efficiencies, reduce waiting time, provide personalized patient-centered care and securely use data to develop public health policies to enhance community health and for disease prevention, moving towards a digital ecosystem in the health sector is key. The Nabidh project is one of the main initiatives that will enable us to create a digital health ecosystem for Dubai. We are proud of the collaboration with hospitals across the public and the private health sector.”
Al Ketbi highlighted that after all hospitals are onboarded, clinics will undergo onboarding to be a part of the emirate’s digital drive. He highlighted that the DHA prioritises the utilisation of latest digital technologies and cutting-edge solutions to drive sector progression.
Dr Marwan Al Mulla, CEO of Health Regulation Sector at the DHA, said that collaboration with the health sector is key to ensuring the growth and development of the health sector and digitisation of health services is the future just as digitisation is the future across other sectors.
Dr Al Mulla added that this initiative will lead radically transform the manner in which patients and physicians access medical data and will benefit patients as well as the overall health sector.
Private hospital groups, such as Mediclinic, Aster, Saudi German Hospital, Prime Health, NMC, Al Zahra Hospital have been onboarded onto the Nabidh initiative.
Easy access
Dr Mohammad Al Redha, director of DHA’s Health Informatics and Smart Health Department, said: “With easy access to aggregated patient records, physicians of connected facilities from different departments, such as Internal Medicine, General Practice, General Surgery, Orthopaedic Surgery and Obstetrics and Gynaecology have benefited from NABIDH to make faster, well-informed decisions, reduce the duplication of tests, and ultimately improve quality of care.”
Al Redha added that NABIDH will ensure continuity of care, convenience and the ability of patients to seek second medical opinions without the need to physically carry their medical files.
He said that DHA will achieve 100 per cent compliance for hospitals by early 2023 and onboarding of clinics will be completed by the last quarter of 2023.
