A Pan-Arab Personal Health Record: two sessions at ArabHealth

What would it take for personal health records to work across the Arab world? I really enjoyed discussing this topic with the panelists the ArabHealth team put together.

Dr Samah Ismail started a fireside chat in the morning about my paper on a pan-Arab PHR. I’ve watched Samah and her team at Malaffi (Abu Dhabi Health Information Exchange) put together the data sets and data quality from all health care providers in Abu Dhabi over the years. They are pioneers in the Arab world. Making nation-controlled data exchanges like Malaffi available to patient-controlled personal health records would allow citizens to access their data across the Arab world.

The afternoon panel was a deep-dive on this and the audience participation showed fascination by the question and possible answers. Sheikh Khalid Al Khalifa from Bahrain’s Supreme Council for Health explained why he had chosen personal health records as the topic of his PhD. Patients engaging with health care data and taking actions for health improvement are critical to every nation’s delivery of affordable health care. Dr. Khulood Alsayegh from Dubai Health Authority‘s NABIDH explained plans to exchange data with Malaffi (Abu Dhabi Health Information Exchange) and Riayati, the other UAE exchanges. “Once you prove this between exchanges in one country, you can scale this between exchanges with other countries, the path is clear” said Sheikh Khalid.

Dr. Sanji de Sylva from Malaffi explained the exchanges early approach to working with the private sector, using M42 Health‘s technology expertise to build the platform, and working further to develop the genome sequencing infrastructure. Prof David Watts explained how his private sector personal health record platform World Data Exchange works with national exchanges on behalf of patients. As a law professor, the legislation for the European Health Data Space is the most advanced model to learn from.

If you enjoyed these conversations, do join me for my CME lecture on Data Aggregation for Population Health Insights at the Public Health Conference in Abu Dhabi room B. I will be taking a personal health records angle as the data sets coming from the citizen and home devices in coming years will dwarf the clinician-contributed data sets in quantity and quality. These data sets will drive the population health insights.