For a look at how the health care of the future will be shaped by artificial intelligence and data, Abu Dhabi is a good start.
The genetic makeup of most of the local population has been sequenced, allowing anyone’s high risk of disease to be detected — and action to be taken — long before symptoms appear. Apps help patients navigate their care, with plans underway to connect them to everything from data delivered by wearable devices to medical records as well as to their doctors.
“We use AI to predict conditions and improve medical outcomes and by improving outcomes, we’re reducing hospitalization costs, reducing costs for the system,” said Dimitris Moulavasilis, the chief executive of M42, a global health care company headquartered in the capital of the United Arab Emirates that underpins the health system there and is expanding rapidly abroad.
“We’re using genomics data to create population programs, which, again predict conditions, keep people healthy and we are using digital to organize health systems.”
“I think there is a wish across the globe that we should be able to improve the care delivered and reduce the cost. So how we can move from a reactive, episodic sick care where we are today.”
Courtesy of M42
Moulavasilis noted that health care costs vary from 7 to 8 percent of GDP in Eastern Europe to as high as 17 percent in the United States, but the costs are growing faster than economic growth rates everywhere.
He said some of the biggest beneficiaries of data-driven and AI-powered health care would be in the less wealthy countries of the Global South that are starting from a lower base and can build their health systems in a more effective way.
Personalized Treatments
“Data plays a role as AI allows for personalized treatments, which allows patients to get treated, or you may predict conditions and patients might not get sick, and you can avoid the potential disease before it happens,” he said, adding that it was also important considering increasing longevity.
“People want to have a longer health span, not necessarily 200 years, but to live healthily until the end of their biological lives.”
M42 is already the largest health care group in the Middle East and serves some 15 million patients worldwide with operations in 27 countries. Its revenues have grown five times in the past seven years.
M42 highlights examples of specific patients who have already been helped — such as a 40-year-old Emirati woman who was identified as having a 100 percent chance of thyroid cancer because of a gene mutation. She was treated straight away. Then there was the eight-year-old with vision loss, which was again pinned down to a gene mutation and treatment provided.
“In Abu Dhabi, we have digitalized all the system. Digitalizing the system is not just applying some technologies, it is designing the systems and applying them. We are the engine behind the health information exchange,” Moulavasilis said.
M42 has an advantage being based in a center with a commitment to high-tech investment and to becoming a base for research, as well as with possibly the world’s most extensive genome program by percentage of people covered — with more than 800,000 of 1.3 million Emiratis already sequenced and the number rising quickly. M42 runs the program in partnership with the Department of Health.
M42
“They have the metrics, the people, the sophistication, and they are embracing all these new technologies, so we may try to deploy new models of care here, which then, upon the proof of the efficiency and outcomes we may expand globally,” Moulavasilis said.
“Because we have now all these amazing data sets, we have developed a trusted research environment that with the right privacy for the patient and keeping the data in a sovereign environment, we can extract insights and we can make collaborative research with pharma companies to create new targeted drugs and create new value from the life science space,” Moulavasilis said.
Genome Database
For its genome database, it is recruiting patients across different sectors and genders to make its data sets fully representative, with models trained on different nationalities. At the same time, respect is paid to protecting individuals’ and countries’ rights to data privacy.
M42’s operations extend much further than Abu Dhabi. Through acquisitions and organic growth, it now has more than 480 facilities in 26 countries and over 20,000 employees. It foresees annual growth in the future at around 8 to 10 percent.
Although M42 is not yet in the United States, it is investigating opportunities for investment there. It is already in most European countries and has a significant presence in Latin America, including Brazil and Chile. It also has a major presence close to home in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries.
In Uzbekistan, it is collaborating and exploring opportunities for a strategic partnership on the Uzbek Genome Program.
“The Global South really is an important space for expansion,” Moulavasilis said, particularly after the acquisition of kidney-care provider Diaverum. “We are in discussion with many countries, particularly the Global South.”
M42’s biggest challenge is not technology, it is human nurses and physicians, Moulavasilis said. There again, however, AI helps all to work more effectively.
“As the population grows and ages, there’s a big amount of nurses who the global national health systems lack today,” he said. “Now we’re privileged to be perceived as employees of choice because of the use of digital and AI, so nurses can be always very much productive, focusing what they are trained to do like provide care, as opposed to liaise with all the bureaucratic and the routine, non-valuable, mundane activities.”
M42
