We explore the role of digital health in Saudi Arabia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and discover how the learnings can be used to formulate the Kingdom’s strategic plans for the digitalisation of the healthcare system in the future.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is recognised globally as having deployed a strategy to manage the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak as an example of good practice. Based on its experience with other coronaviruses such as MERS-CoV, in early January, the Kingdom quickly developed country-specific guidelines based on WHO guidelines to deal with the new virus.

The country’s Ministry of Health (MoH) has continued to scale up surveillance, and testing measures with all suspected cases are investigated, particularly at points of entry, and confirmed cases were immediately isolated and treated. The MOH designated 25 hospitals, amounting to 80,000 hospital beds - 2,200 of which are to be used for the isolation of suspected/quarantined cases - and 8,000 intensive care unit (ICU) beds for the treatment of COVID-19 cases.

Containing the COVID-19 infection rate and keeping mortality low has largely been attributed to the role of digital health in the MoH’s response strategy. This involved setting up a number of technology applications and data domains to respond to the COVID-19 Command & Contact Centre requirements. It also included the development of dashboards and connecting data through the National Health Observatory (NHO), as well as conducting awareness and education campaigns through the telecommunications network. The deployment of digital applications such as mobile health applications, telehealth, virtual clinics and robotics to support that COVID-19 response has proved particularly successful with 2,438 suspected cases (as of 18 April) of COVID-19 identified through mobile health applications alone.

As COVID-19 is a pandemic of the new age and has taken a matter of weeks to get around the world, the digital health solutions employed by Saudi Arabia during the outbreak are now being used to revolutionise the healthcare system and industry, providing opportunities to transform the delivery of healthcare and enhance patient care beyond the outbreak.

According to Dr Amr Jamal, who is an associate professor and family physician at King Saud University Medical City, and a board member and founding member of the Saudi Association for Health Informatics; since the confirmation of the first COVID-19 case in the country, the digital transformation of the healthcare system that has taken place in Saudi Arabia has been tremendous, equalling and surpassing what the country has tried to achieve in the last four to five years on its journey to digital transformation.

So how then is this new wave of digital health transformation supporting health system capacity, including the workforce, the supplies and the infrastructure, and population behaviour in the Kingdom? As Dr Jamal explains, the aim is to increase the health system capacity in the country to cope with as many cases of COVID-19 as it can.

“Through the healthcare infrastructure, we can utilise digital health to quantify, monitor, predict and reallocate the resources that we currently have. When it comes to supply, digital health can equal efficient and equitable production and distribution on both a national and an organisational level. We also need to protect the healthcare workforce and their families, and build their capacity and online training in terms of knowing how to deal with the COVID-19 caseload.”

The MoH is providing pro-active measures for the country’s vulnerable population through telemedicine, virtual, phone and text message clinics, as well as online medication delivery. Earlier this year, the MoH expanded its telemedicine regulations with the launch of the new e-health “Seha” App that provides ease of medical consultation with doctors by connecting the patients for virtual face-to-face consultations across the country. During the COVID-19 pandemic, all citizens have access to the MoH mobile health applications even if they do not have a data contract with their telecommunications provider.

The implementation of electronic medical records (EMR) in all hospitals across Saudi Arabia is one of the core components of the healthcare strategy, in line with Vision 2030. “During the outbreak, both patients and physicians can access EMRs from their homes and home healthcare has also allowed us to provide vaccinations to vulnerable patients and critical follow-up care to chronic disease patients in their own homes,” explains Dr Jamal, who is also the conference chair for the upcoming Digital Health and Innovation Conference at Global Health 2020 in Riyadh.

According to a recent report by KPMG Al Fozan & Partners, Saudi Arabia’s health system will continue to benefit tremendously from better out-of-hospital and community-based services, as the Kingdom adopts Integrated Care Systems (ICS) and the MoH continues to implement its e-health strategy that seeks to connect all levels of care digitally. This represents a major investment in healthcare technology, as well as significant clinical, operational and cultural challenges.