Saudi Arabia’s healthcare sector is increasingly focusing not only on treating diseases but also on predicting and preventing them before they develop. Artificial intelligence, genomics and data-sharing systems are helping healthcare providers identify health risks earlier and take preventive measures.
Healthcare, investment and pharmaceutical leaders discussed these technologies at the Forbes Middle East Healthcare Leaders Summit in Riyadh. Speakers highlighted data-sharing as an emerging tool that could improve early intervention and prevention efforts.
Speaking to Arab News at the summit, Dr. Howard S. Podolsky, CEO of Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare, said removing barriers between different healthcare databases could help providers better understand health risks across the population.
“Data sharing, tearing down the silos, so that, we can have that information anonymized, and be able to cohort it in a way that we can best predict where the population is in terms of health, wellness and disease risk stratification, when we do that, we can get ahead of and create primary prevention within population health,” Podolsky said.
Podolsky also joined a panel discussion on the impact of AI across the healthcare system. He said access to protected and anonymized data would be essential to this change.
“I think being able to get our hands on the data is most important, anonymized, of course, and protected, of course, but that’s going to be key to our successful population health and making a difference,” he told Arab News.
While data can help identify health risks across large groups of people, genomics is playing a key role in helping healthcare providers understand individual risks.
Sameh M. Azzam, senior director of biotechnology, MENA, at Hikma Pharmaceuticals, told Arab News that healthcare is gradually moving from identifying patients after a disease appears to understanding genetic mutations and inherited risks through testing. This approach can also help identify risks linked to conditions such as cancer.
“We are moving from detecting the patients at the disease area, then gradually we will be moving to know which genes or genomes, or multiple mutations, are causing this cancer, and this is where we reach prevention,” he said.
“The important point here is moving gradually towards understanding more the genome and how the environment is affecting the genome and vice versa,” Azzam added. “The earlier we go to understand the genome, the more we can go to prevention.”
Azzam said the Kingdom is getting closer to developing an ecosystem that can support and facilitate this level of genetic testing.
The move toward preventive healthcare also includes monitoring patients after diagnosis. Patient feedback can provide important data on how treatments perform after they enter the market and are used in real-world situations.
Dr. Gunjan Bhardwaj, founder and CEO of Partex AI, discussed the importance of feedback from patients outside clinical trials. He said telehealth and telemedicine platforms can collect this information and help companies determine whether their treatments are achieving the desired results and what may need to be improved.
“Once drugs are out in the market, you need to ask these patients whether these therapies actually work with intended healthcare outcomes or not,” he told Arab News.
Bhardwaj cited the regional platform Altibbi as an example of how patient feedback can be collected and used to guide compounding pharmacies in adjusting dosages and formulations based on patient needs.
For Saudi Arabia, Bhardwaj said the country’s developing healthcare system creates an opportunity to introduce new models without being limited by older systems.
“There is huge opportunity, because there is no legacy,” he said. “You’re building a garden from scratch.”
Rather than simply “sowing the seeds,” he added, the Kingdom has the opportunity to “transplant the trees.”
