Article by Mansoor Al Mansoori and Noura Al Ghaithi: “For more than a decade, global leaders have recognized the rising burden of chronic, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer. These conditions are the leading cause of death globally – accounting for 71% of all deaths – and represent the most costly, preventable health challenge of our time.
Abu Dhabi, however, is establishing a new global benchmark for health, demonstrating that prevention at population scale is possible. Advances in digitalization, AI, multimodal data and life sciences technology are making it possible to move decisively from reactive “sick care” to predictive, proactive and personalized healthcare…At the core of its digital health transformation lies a unified strategy: Predict, Prevent and Act to Cure and to Restore. This is powered by Abu Dhabi’s Intelligent Health System, which integrates medical records, insurance data, genomics, environmental and lifestyle data into a fully sovereign, privacy-protected ecosystem.
Abu Dhabi’s Predict, Prevent and Act to Cure and to Restore healthy system framework.Image: DOH Abu Dhabi
This infrastructure is powered by platforms like Malaffi, the region’s first health information exchange, connecting 100% of the emirate’s public and private healthcare providers and insurers with real-time access to patient histories, enabling more coordinated, efficient and patient-centred care and reducing system level costs for diagnostics.
Meanwhile, Sahatna, a mobile app used by more than 800,000 residents, empowers the community members to take ownership of their health. It provides secure access to personal health data, enables proactive appointment booking across the ecosystem, instant telehealth consultations, wellness tracking and behavioural nudges toward prevention. This plays a critical role in simplifying personal health, helping to shift the public’s mindset from reactive treatment to self-led prevention…(More)”.
