No Limits: Middle East Governments Make Sustained Commitments to Healthcare
GE HealthCare Middle East, Turkey & Africa
Create a world where healthcare has no limits
No Limits: Middle East Governments Make Sustained Commitments to Healthcare
Across the Middle East, healthcare has become a top priority for governments and policymakers, a trend that is set to continue. From Iraq and Saudi Arabia to the UAE and Kuwait, governments are allocating budgets, and the private sector is increasing investment.
Underlying this commitment is a determination by ministries and policymakers to improve healthcare access, expand the range of services available, and boost the quality of care. In so doing, they seek to increase life expectancy, lower disease morbidity and mortality rates, and shrink the flow of residents traveling overseas for treatment.
In Egypt, for example, the new fiscal-year budget will increase healthcare spending by nearly 25%.[1] In Saudi Arabia, 17% of the 2024 budget was committed to healthcare,[2] while private sector spending in the Kingdom will combine with government spending for a total healthcare market of SR330 billion (US$88 billion) by 2030.[3]
As such, the overall healthcare market was projected to have grown by more than 10% a year over the four years to 2023.[4] Looking ahead to 2027 across the GCC in particular, the healthcare market is set to grow 5.4% a year, reaching US$135.5 billion.[5]
Supporting this growth are policy approaches, include creating nationwide disease management pathways, in areas such as prostate and breast cancer in Egypt for example, to leaning into AI and digitization, which are increasing priorities in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
From regulators to PPPs
There also is a move to shift government from primarily a healthcare provider to more of a healthcare regulator that creates the right environment for private providers to deliver affordable high-quality care to a greater share of the population.
As a result, while in some countries the public sector healthcare infrastructure remains a crucial part of expanding high-quality care delivery, in other countries, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, policymakers have worked to expand the role of health insurance in making private care more affordable to more people.
Gulf states have been the pioneers in this shift toward insurance funded healthcare, but other countries such as Egypt also are looking to health insurance to expand quality healthcare access.
Countries across the region also are leveraging public-private partnerships to minimize capital allocations from state budgets, while still pursuing construction of much needed facilities and enhancing operations at existing ones. A PPP in Saudi Arabia, for example, is helping improve radiology and imaging services across seven Ministry of Health hospitals.[6] By looking to PPPs, governments can better leverage their healthcare dollars to achieve their goals more quickly, more efficiently and more effectively.
AI: assisting doctors
Digitization and AI also are likely to play an increasingly important role in achieving national healthcare goal by helping improve patient care, reduce costs, and expand delivery.
On the one hand, digitization makes it possible to expand access by connecting rural and remote clinics and their patients with experts based in larger cities. It also can reduce costs by enabling remote monitoring of post-operative patients who can go home, rather than take up an expensive bed in a hospital.
On the other hand, AI can provide huge assistance to healthcare providers, large operators and individual physicians.
Hospitals and health ministries can deploy AI to monitor and manage their facilities, reviewing data streams to help optimize everything from the use of medical imaging equipment to operating room scheduling to patient flows in emergency departments and outpatient clinics.
AI also can help public health officials monitor disease prevalence and infectious disease outbreaks, identify trends and raise alarms.
On a more granular level, AI embedded in equipment can help technicians and doctors perform medical imaging scans more quickly and comfortably for patients, while giving doctors higher quality, more detailed scans.
AI also can be trained on thousands of cases to build algorithms to support doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of all types of diseases and conditions. AI can provide rapid and accurate insights to shorten diagnostic and treatment planning times and help improve precision and accuracy.
However, they will never replace doctors and other clinicians, as we will always need a trained, empathetic, professional to perform hands-on examinations and make the diagnostic and treatment decisions best suited to each patient.
Matching actions to words
The commitment by countries across the Middle East to boost healthcare and thus the quality of life and economic vibrancy of their nations is embedded in virtually every national economic vision statement. It’s also clearly demonstrated in their budgets, year after year.
At GE HealthCare, we are committed to creating a world where healthcare has no limits. In the Middle East, that means continuing to deepen our presence in countries across the region by hiring more people, delivering more training, deploying more technologies, and expanding our service and partner offerings.
We are matching our actions to our words and are playing a vital role in helping countries achieve their national healthcare goals. Across the region, we have dedicated ourselves to working with governments, private healthcare providers, and other partners to expand high-quality healthcare access to more people and communities, whether they are in the largest urban centers or seeking care in the smallest rural village.
-ends-
Sales & Marketing Professional ?? Results Driven ?? Clinical Diagnostics ?? Strategic ?? Capital Equipment
4 个月Nice read. I think it is fair to say that the UAE's growth and advancements in healthcare have been a positive influence on neighboring countries. It is encouraging to see the entire Middle East taking such initiatives towards building stronger, more affordable, and more accessible healthcare systems.