Could you tell us about your leadership philosophy and approach to managing such a large healthcare organisation?
I always believe that leadership is about results, not rhetoric. My leadership philosophy is based on harmony between purpose, people and performance.
Purpose – The purpose of American Hospital Dubai is to benefit people through our benchmark performance. Our purpose helps us understand people and define our performance. The people in our organisation serves patients, stakeholders and partners.
Performance – How can excellence and dynamism across the organisation be created?
Empowering staff can help us meet our patients’ expectations. Effective leadership creates a baseline-to-top rise of core values. We nurture the grassroots – our people – so the entire ecosystem of American Hospital Dubai is healthy and thriving.
How does American Hospital Dubai do it? We choose the best human expertise and empower it through training. We integrate human potential with innovation and we nurture a culture of performance excellence through motivation, recognition and acknowledgement of contributions. We recognise the shared values of our purpose; that is delivering benchmark healthcare.
What would you consider the top challenges facing the healthcare sector in the Middle East? How is American Hospital Dubai addressing these challenges?
We have the following challenges at a national level: Keeping pace with technological evolution – Healthcare must integrate predictive analytics, data forecasting and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with performance. These advancements align with the region’s commitment to embracing innovation for enhanced patient care.
Collaboration in healthcare – These are critical for future success. The UAE actively collaborates with many countries, creating solutions for all.
Healthcare spending and public health advancements – Governments must cut a larger slice from the budget for healthcare requirements, including boosting the numbers of healthcare providers and skilled professionals, investment in infrastructure and facilities, and technology and development to widen the region’s healthcare footprint. For example, hospitals are a critical national healthcare asset. The UAE’s projected hospital revenue is $9.14bn for 2024.
Healthcare talent retention and capacity building – The UAE’s Golden Visa for doctors has been a significant step in increasing healthcare professionals’ numbers and contributions. Countries must retain their talent pool for a consistently thriving healthcare ecosystem.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) Integrated National Database – The UAE has raced ahead in this area. Countries need to have this critical asset to improve healthcare delivery.
We also have challenges at the healthcare provider level: Ensuring sustainability – Healthcare must pay attention to resource overutilisation, environmental impact and achieving a smaller carbon footprint through waste reduction, recycling, energy and cost-saving systems and processes. AHD has always focused on sustainable measures. Our sustainability policy measures our performance and demands accountability.
We focus on the following to design our patient-centric healthcare model:
- Human expertise for people.
- Innovation for people.
- Technology for people.
Embracing disruption – Every healthcare professional and non-clinical worker must stay abreast of disruptions through training programmes, workshops, and knowledge transfers. We integrate predictive analytics, AI and robotics with our performance. American Hospital Dubai (AHD) has set a milestone in the region with the launch of the first artificial intelligence (AI) medical research centre in the UAE, in collaboration with Cerner.
Expertise blending is healthcare’s new normal. AHD’s partnerships with Mayo Clinic and Siemens are examples of how we expand the circle of our performance. Increasing Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) – We are in the era of collaborative impact, and healthcare must work closely with the government’s objectives to create maximum public health outcomes. AHD’s support of government healthcare objectives included initiatives that played a significant role in pandemic containment.
Taking a pioneering role – Healthcare providers must expand beyond lateral transactions to engineer more extensive benefits for people. We integrate education with healthcare to widen the impact on society. Our American Health Academic Institute (AHAI) leads knowledge-sharing for the greater good. Our American Hospital Care Network (AHCN) provides third-party management and manages other healthcare providers and facilities as a core function.
We are the first hospital in the Middle East to adopt this concept. We are setting up a medical college in partnership with the prestigious Baylor Medical College in Houston, Texas. It’s the region’s first such initiative.
Digital transformation and technologies like AI are revolutionising healthcare globally. How is American Hospital Dubai leveraging new technologies to improve patient experiences and clinical outcomes?
AI could contribute to almost 13.6 percent of UAE’s GDP by 2030, according to a PwC report. The country is aiming for a high AI literacy. Its 2031 National AI Strategy encompasses core research, AI-led breakthroughs, and more.
We are in the era of predictive medicine and value-based healthcare delivery. AHD’s Centre of Excellence in Robotic Surgery (COERS) has performed more than 1,500 robotic surgeries, and we are training 20 Emirati surgeons in robotic surgery by 2024.
We are the region’s first private healthcare facility to earn accreditation from the US-based Surgical Review Corporation (SRC). We have partnered with Robotic Surgical Systems (RSS) and UK-based CMR Surgicals to set up the region’s first training hub and educational academy to raise robotic surgery standards.
We also partnered with Oracle Cloud Applications and Cerner for a significant digital transformation to improve our medical service excellence and expertise across our clinical and business domains.
How does digitisation lead to enhanced patient experience?
Digitisation reduces costs, optimises physician performance, improves inventory management, and ensures the best talent is hired and retained.
Healthcare quality and patient safety are top priorities. What systems and processes have you implemented to ensure high standards of clinical governance and excellence?
A healthcare provider’s performance excellence is not born; it must be created. AHD devised and implemented its own service excellence programme. It comprises five values every member of the AHD team abides by at all times to deliver the highest level of care to patients, customers and stakeholders: Humility; empathy, advisory, reliability, and teamwork.
Our Service Excellence Programme further enhances our service quality to patients and visitors and our international and regulatory standards of care. We follow critical principles of excellence to ensure benchmark patient care. These are:
Hiring best-in-class medical professionals; harnessing technology (AI, big data, robotics and research) to actualise superior treatment outcomes. Evidence-based care and innovation; Collaboration with the world’s leading healthcare providers and innovators; Digitisation for streamlined workflows and efficiency; and continuous employee training, upskilling and mentoring. We also follow mandatory practices that ensure our performance is consistently at the forefront.
American Hospital Dubai is known for its Centres of Excellence in various specialities. What are your key focus areas and strategies to advance specialised clinical services?
To ensure our Centres of Excellence deliver on their purpose, we combine the following:
Concept: To offer the most advanced and precise personalised treatments for diseases. We look at every patient’s disease history 360 degrees and chart the course between the disease and the solution to see what areas it covers for each patient.
Expertise: We combine advanced domain knowledge and evidence-based treatment expertise every time for a tailored outcome. Each patient is different, though the disease field may be the same.
Implementation: We ensure all resources, the best human expertise, the latest technology and knowledge, scientific breakthroughs and state-of-the-art infrastructure.
Alignment: Our Centres of Excellence work with a multidisciplinary synergy to ensure each patient receives comprehensive treatment based on their unique medical history.
Resources: Ensuring Centres of Excellence deliver on their promise calls for resource availability. We invest in innovation and expertise to keep our Centres the leading hubs of new treatment solutions.
Leadership and results: We are committed to leadership for advancement. These strategies ensure our Centres of Excellence deliver the desired treatment outcomes and lead medical excellence.
Collaboration and partnerships are important in healthcare. What value do partnerships with organisations such as the Mayo Clinic bring, and what new partnerships are you pursuing?
AHD’s core purpose is delivering the best patient-focused care. We partner with healthcare entities with a shared ideology to open new horizons in patient-centric care. We were the first hospital in the Middle East to become a Mayo Clinic Network Member (MCNM) and the second hospital globally to be awarded the prestigious JCI accreditation.
Our partnership is driven by expansion for excellence, togetherness for innovation, synergy for solutions, and knowledge sharing. Our alliance with Mayo Clinic, a global healthcare benchmark, creates value-added extra dimensions in consultative expertise, disease management, second opinions of complex cases, and reference data, and benefits from Mayo’s clinical, operational and business models.
Our new partnerships include Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas: AHD signed a MoU with the prestigious Baylor College of Medicine to establish a medical college in Dubai. It will be a milestone project in the region’s healthcare landscape.
Fakeeh University Hospital Dubai: We have has signed a strategic agreement with Fakeeh University Hospital to boost medical tourism from our offices in Nigeria to Fakeeh University. This partnership will boost medical cooperation, raise medical care standards, and promote training and research skills to enhance the healthcare landscape across the MEA region.
How do you measure the impact and outcomes of your research programmes and initiatives? What are your priorities in building healthcare research capacity in the region?
We implement the data findings to create positive outcomes. Our Cerner-collaborated AI research centre helped us devise a Covid-19 model on patient mortality and ICU admission prediction.
Data harvesting: AI-led algorithms analysed more than 5,000 attributes, top 50 risk identifiers globally and a 100,000 combination of identifiers for AHD to predict patients at high risk for ICU admissions and mortality.
Implementation: We provided timely and appropriate care based on the data.
Outcome: Reduced numbers of ICU admissions and mortalities.
Initiative: We partnered with Oracle Cloud Applications and Cerner Corporation to help
enhance our digital transformation.
Implementation: Integrating the hospital’s business and clinical operations to improve patient care processes and systems.
Outcome: Real-time data showing reduced costs through streamlined workflow, higher
productivity and performance, and trackable employee satisfaction.
What role do training and skills development play in your overall strategy? How is the American Hospital Academic Institute (AHAI) contributing to the healthcare talent pipeline?
AHD is more than a healthcare provider; it is a transformer. Our mission is to educate healthcare professionals in the region to be innovators and accelerators so, we invest in training, upskilling and expanding talent boundaries in medicine and we proud to play a significant role in developing the next generation of healthcare leaders.
American Hospital Academic Institute is affiliated with UAE’s leading medical schools such as the University of Sharjah, Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences (MBRU) and the Gulf Medical University (GMU). AHAI has also established a research committee with the University of Sharjah’s American Hospital Education Joint Committee for medical research in the region and beyond.
AHAI’s responsibilities Include developing medical students; training international medical students; developing healthcare alliance specialities including pharmacy, radiology and medical imaging, clinical nutrition and laboratories; promoting research in medicine and healthcare; and providing opportunities for healthcare practitioners in the region with different professional backgrounds for continued medical education.
We are also working on collaborating with DHA and the National Institute of Healthcare Science for advanced post-graduate training and international internship programmes and promoting an Arab Board of Medical and Surgical Specialties.
Sustainability and environmental stewardship are growing priorities. What policies/programmes does American Hospital Dubai have to promote ESG best practices?
At AHD, we believe green healthcare is integral to our vision and mission. We formally launched the American Hospital Sustainable Policy in 2023. It enshrines sustainable practices at the heart of our performance, mandating measurability and accountability to enable AHD to become the region’s leading green healthcare model.
Our sustainability practices include energy savings, greening the environment, reducing fuel emissions through transport options, improving our medical waste management, e-recycling, using eco-friendly building materials through retrofitting, using green cleaning solutions for our hospital and clinics, improving indoor air quality and implement farm-to-plate food practices in our hospital kitchen.
We planted an equivalent of 1 acre of forest cover by greening American Hospital Dubai’s premises and grew 261,359 trees from seedlings over 10 years. We save 2,176 gallons of water daily and 21,900 litres annually with touchless faucets and dual-flush WCs.
WE have reduced our Energy Use Intensity (EUI) from 47.00 in 2020 to 34.00 in 2022, achieving 20,384,129 kWh (kilowatt-hours) savings.
Our sustainability practices include energy savings, greening the environment, reducing fuel emissions through transport options, improving our medical waste management, e-recycling, using eco-friendly building materials through retrofitting, using green cleaning solutions for our hospital and clinics, improving indoor air quality and implement farm-to-plate food practices in our hospital kitchen.
We planted an equivalent of 1 acre of forest cover by greening American Hospital Dubai’s premises and grew 261,359 trees from seedlings over 10 years. We save 2,176 gallons of water daily and 21,900 litres annually with touchless faucets and dual-flush WCs.
WE have reduced our Energy Use Intensity (EUI) from 47.00 in 2020 to 34.00 in 2022, achieving 20,384,129 kWh (kilowatt-hours) savings.
What are your views on future healthcare trends, and how is American Hospital Dubai preparing for these changes?
We believe the healthcare architecture of the future rests on these four pillars:
Predictive medicine; personalised medicine; participatory medicine; and preventive medicine.
These means that we must predict the health possibilities of an individual, create personalised treatments for them, encourage patient participation and help them prevent diseases through adaptive lifestyles and education.
Everything else – Technology, gadgets, AI, medicine, genomics, research, innovation, big data, robotics, and analytics – must fit within these borders.
What is grabbing your attention for the future of healthcare?
We believe the future of healthcare will be on the personalisation of medicine based on AI and data analytics.
Developing and using healthcare technology in a cultural context: This will be increasingly critical because, as we have seen, disease, treatment and cultural dimensions are inextricable in creating positive care outcomes.
We also see a sharper focus on mental health and wellbeing, greater collaboration between global healthcare organisations in achieving chronic and complex disease breakthroughs. And finally, I would like to add that sustainable healthcare is the future, and it is here.
How Is American Hospital Dubai preparing for the future?
We will remain committed to our intentionally designed patient experience and build our entire care ecosystem around it. We are a leader in complex diseases, robotic surgeries, AI-led healthcare solutions, the medical tourism destination of choice, and forging global partnerships with leading medical pioneers to bring the best healthcare solutions to the region.
We will continue to expand our medical technologies, partner with the best medical pioneers globally, advance our education objectives for the greater good, keep pace with innovations and AI, and meet our sustainability KPIs. At AHD, we believe healthcare is an ideology that aims to achieve the ultimate benefit of humanity – good health.