Patients today are more informed than ever before – they expect, and deserve, the very highest standards of healthcare. This drives us to look at how digital health can shape their experience, for the better, and ensure that we deliver care that is of the highest quality. We must also focus on issues such as over-spending and over-consumption, to address pressure from payers and explore how technology can help manage the increasing demands of chronic diseases, an aging population – or even of unexpected public health emergencies.

In Abu Dhabi, we truly have become the change thanks to the foresight of our leaders. While our health system may be relatively young, in some ways we have benefited from a lack of legacy infrastructure and some of the associated challenges, and our leaders have been able to design a future-ready health system from the ground up. In a short space of time, we have built one of the world’s most digitally empowered healthcare ecosystems, positioning our Emirate as a global healthcare leader.

We have put in place a digital health platform that meets the holistic needs of our society – and prepares us for tomorrow. We have looked to our peers for inspiration and drawn on the learnings and experiences of organisations from across the world to develop Malaffi, a sustainable and scalable HIE platform that is supporting more comprehensive, cohesive, and higher quality healthcare delivery. The journey to establishing Malaffi has been complex, but is an example of how, when we learn from others, great things can happen.

Looking forward, as we capture more data and develop new analytic tools, the full social and economic potential for digital health can be realised. We will have access to more valuable insights, and we can expand the meaningfulness of the information we have. We can develop and extend systems for syndromic and pandemic surveillance and response, so globally we can be prepared to handle any future public health threat. We can also advance population health management, predict disease patterns and trends, and plan better health prevention programmes.

But we must keep working together, to drive change forward. We should look beyond healthcare to other industries, exploring the technologies in use elsewhere to see what could be replicated in our sector. We must educate and mentor the next generation of scientists and data analysts to nurture their passion for innovation and to bring to life the breakthroughs of tomorrow.

This article was published on HIMSS and can be found here