Transforming and scaling healthcare in Saudi Arabia
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Transforming and scaling healthcare in Saudi Arabia

Virtual hospitals, telehealth, centralised appointment services, integrated health services, planned usage of AI, has prompted Ministry of Health to adopt VMware managed multi-cloud services platform.

The MoH decided to spread its IT workloads across various service providers, including STC and Mobily and unify under VMware Cloud Foundation.

Saudi Arabia’s Health Sector Transformation Programme aims to restructure the health sector in the country. The Programme depends on the principle of value-based care, which ensures transparency and financial sustainability by promoting public health and preventing diseases.

Saif M Mashat, Managing Director VMware, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and Yemen

The Programme aims to improve access to health services by expanding the provision of e-health services and digital solutions, as well as improving the quality of health services. The Health Sector Transformation Programme works on harmonising and coordinating between all health sector entities.

Currently the Ministry of Health, MoH runs the country’s public healthcare service, which consists of hospitals, clinics and health centres catering to a growing population of more than 35 million people.

To meet the growing demand for healthcare services in Saudi Arabia, and to help boost the efficiency and agility of the provision of services, the MoH needed to simplify and modernise its IT systems. It decided to do this by moving to a unified, multi-cloud strategy with VMware, with all workloads under one umbrella and the ability to offer innovative IT services to the entire healthcare sector across the country.

Implementation

The MoH decided to spread its IT workloads across various service providers, including telecom operators STC and Mobily, and unify everything under VMware Cloud Foundation. The increased resilience allowed workloads to be moved between providers, while giving the MoH’s IT team visibility of, and the ability to manage, workloads from a single pane of glass.

The MoH and VMware are continuing to move additional workloads to the new environment.

The deployment of VMware VCF includes VMware NSX-T Data Center as the platform for building the secure virtual cloud network; VMware vRealize Suite as the cloud management suite to provide automation, operations, log analytics, and lifecycle management on-premises; and VMware vSAN to reduce storage complexity and cost.

The deployment also included VMware vCenter to gain visibility across the hybrid cloud from a single console, and VMware vSphere to enable the MoH to develop and deploy modern applications from the cloud. The MoH deployed VMware HCX to help streamline application migration, workload rebalancing and business continuity across the environment.

With the full VCF stack deployed, Saudi Arabia’s entire public healthcare system is set to benefit from the resiliency, agility and efficiency created by the shared cloud platform. Each healthcare facility will save valuable resources by having access to virtual infrastructure, storage, machines, and as-a-service applications from the Ministry of Health. They will also be able to design and deploy applications from the cloud, giving them the freedom to innovate and provide stellar services to patients.

Benefits

By having a unified cloud management system, doctors, nurses and patients will have reliable and secure access to patient records wherever they are, and all healthcare professionals, including hospital managers, will have improved access to the data they need, without worrying about potentially disruptive IT outages.

“All departments have gained agility, mobility, and can achieve a faster response to business requirements, which will elevate healthcare in the Kingdom,” says Eng Khalid Almedbel, CIO Ministry of Health.

MoH runs the country’s public healthcare service, which consists of hospitals, clinics and health centres catering to a population of 35+ million people.

The country’s public healthcare system is set to benefit from resiliency, agility and efficiency created by the shared cloud platform. Each facility will save resources by having access to virtual infrastructure, storage, machines, and as-a-service applications. They will be able to design and deploy applications from the cloud, giving them the freedom to innovate.

Health clusters are able to gain access to all types of IT services from a services menu. This gives easy access to IT resources, from new email accounts to back-up services, virtual machines and security.

The MoH and VMware are continuing to move additional workloads on to the new environment, and more IT resources will be made available for healthcare facilities to access and use via their IT admin portals.

In the coming months, the MoH is planning to deploy more VMware solutions including VMware Carbon Black for additional cybersecurity, VMware Workspace ONE for secure distributed working, and VMware Tanzu to enable Kubernetes in vSphere, which will bring additional application development capabilities to the Saudi Arabia’s public healthcare providers.

This solution also future proofs the network, by enabling the IT team to add new locations such as private clouds which can be easily integrated into the multi cloud layer, and then controlled from the same portal.

Health clusters and hospitals are now able to gain rapid access to all types of IT services from an intuitive service menu. This enables easy access to IT resources, from new email accounts to back-up services, virtual machines and security.

“We look forward to working in partnership with the MoH as it continues to move workloads to the new environment and offer more cloud-enabled services to healthcare providers across the country,” said Saif Mashat, Managing Director, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen, VMware.

 

Transformation of healthcare in Saudi Arabia

The Programme will focus on boosting public health and expanding the provision of e-health services.

Disaster health services

Saudi Arabia identified in the past decade that health concerns with pilgrims could cause severe problems to the country’s infrastructure during the pilgrimage season. As part of the same strategy, contingency planning was introduced by creation of the Saudi Disaster Medical Assistance Team.

 

Usage of mobile applications

One major service was the creation of eHealth Analytics, abbreviated to Seha. The platform allows Saudi citizens to connect with a physician via the Internet and remotely.

AI embedded in next decade

The Ministry has had an increased focus on artificial intelligence. Planned partnerships with Siemens and Babylon Health will test AI operations and other advanced forms of AI in the country within the next decade.

Seha Virtual Hospital

The Ministry of Health launched the first virtual hospital in the country. Specialised services in the SVH include emergency and critical advice, specialised clinics, multidisciplinary committees, medical support services, and home care services.

937 Call Centre

The Ministry of Health introduced the 937 Call Centre, which uses a toll-free number to provide medical services. The call centre can process and book appointments with a medical professional, which can be done digitally with the introduction of a centralised booking system, known as Mawid.

Performance improvement

The Ministry is implementing the programme of Health Performance and currently includes 99% of hospitals, where more than 40 indicators are used to measure performance in 7 service hubs. To strengthen the role of the private sector, the Ministry of Health has introduced electronic licensing services for medical facilities.

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation is the hybrid cloud platform for modernising datacentres and deploying modern apps. VMware Cloud Foundation delivers enterprise agility, reliability, and efficiency for customers seeking to deploy private and hybrid clouds.

VMware Vsan

Vsan is an enterprise-class storage virtualisation software that provides the simplest path to hyperconverged infrastructure and multi cloud and helps organisations to reduce storage cost and complexity.

VMware NSX-T Datacentre

VMware NSX-T Datacentre is the network virtualisation and security platform that enables the virtual cloud network, a software-defined approach to networking that extends across datacentres, clouds, endpoints, and things.

VMware vRealize Suite

VMware vRealize Suite is a purpose-built management solution for the heterogeneous datacentre and the hybrid cloud. It provides a comprehensive management stack for private and public clouds, multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure.

VMware vCenter

VMware vCenter is advanced server management software that provides a centralised platform for controlling your VMware vSphere environments, allowing you to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure across the hybrid cloud.

VMware HCX

The VMware HCX platform automates the creation of a hybrid interconnect to enable IT administrators to migrate workloads easily and securely to the cloud while maintaining IT best practices, operations and business continuity.

VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere provides the benefits of the cloud for on-premises workloads. It helps meet the throughput and latency needs of distributed workloads by accelerating networking functions on the DPU, and frees up GPU resources for faster AI, ML model training and higher complexity models.

May 6, 2023

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