Embracing Intelligence Through Connectivity: Digital Transformation Journey of American Hospital Dubai
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In the hinterland of a vast desert, a city rises. In this harsh landscape, Dubai has built the world's tallest buildings and grandest hotels. When the city lights shine bright over the desert, people are filled with boundless hope and courage.
Throughout its 30 years of efforts in the health and medical fields, Al Mulla Group has remained committed to transforming cutting-edge technologies into driving forces for improved medical capabilities. As a result, American Hospital Dubai has achieved five "firsts" and one "only":
• The first hospital in the Middle East to be awarded the JCI, which it has obtained seven consecutive times.
• The region's first laboratory in the private sector to be accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), an honor it has received nine consecutive times.
• The first medical institution in Dubai to offer the fourth generation of da Vinci Xi surgical system to conduct robotic surgery services.
• The first private hospital in the UAE to be an American Heart Association (AHA) International Training Center.
• The first cancer programme to offer comprehensive one-stop care in Dubai.
• One of the first members of the Mayo Clinic Care Network.
In addition, American Hospital Dubai has been recognized as the only medical institution in Dubai to be awarded the ultrasound practice accreditation in Abdomen/General, Breast — Diagnostic, and Breast — Interventional fields from the Ultrasound Practice Accreditation Council of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM).
In 2020, COVID-19 presented huge challenges to the whole world. It greatly affected every country and individual globally in an unprecedented way. It also changed the development process of all industries, especially the medical industry. To rise above the challenges with enhanced response and resistance capabilities, digital medical transformation must be implemented as soon as possible.
Setting the benchmark for hospitals in Dubai, American Hospital Dubai quickly responded and initiated digital medical transformation. It planned to become a fully-connected hospital for medical reconnections in order to provide superb medical services.
• Patients need to be connected, which enables them to easily select the help they need. As for hospitals, they need to provide digital network technologies to ensure patient experience.
• Medical personnel need to be connected to obtain required information across scenarios including daily consultation, hospitalization, surgery, and prescription. This helps to improve their work efficiency. In particular, COVID-19 led to a sharp increase in both the volume of data and activity on various systems, especially the picture archiving and communication system (PACS). Against this backdrop, more stable and reliable connectivity is required to support the rapid growth of services.
• Other people, including patients' family members, partners, and IT personnel, also need to be connected.
Mobility is essential to digital transformation. This requires ubiquitous connectivity to meet the interconnection requirements of any person in any scenario, streamlined connectivity silos and data silos, and structurally improved service efficiency and quality.
Since 2018, American Hospital Dubai has been in close cooperation with Huawei. After several rounds of testing, the hospital decided to stick with Huawei as its network technology partner for digital transformation.
To ensure the network connection of American Hospital Dubai, Huawei fully leverages its more than 30 years of experience in the communications domain as well as cutting-edge technologies to provide a network coverage solution for various scenarios such as office, wards, and halls based on hospital service characteristics. To date, Huawei has deployed more than 100 high-performance network switches and routers in the hospital to achieve efficient interconnection in mobile scenarios. Furthermore, over 700 Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 Access Points (APs) have been deployed in the hospital for unified network management. This provides American Hospital Dubai with an excellent connection experience and simplifies its network management.
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of American Hospital Dubai. In the past four years, it has established several new clinics in places such as Jumeirah, Mira, Dubai Hills, and Al Khawaneej. In 2020, the hospital launched a major digital transformation project, aiming to provide a new health IT platform in the form of an electronic health record (EHR) system to improve the safety, quality, and medical experience of patients and medical personnel. In this project, a digital service platform will be provided based on the enterprise resource planning cloud to improve productivity, reduce costs, and optimize the effects of control. Therefore, the fully-connected platform jointly built by Huawei and American Hospital Dubai will become the basis of this project. With the health records of patients uploaded to the cloud, the hospital can extend the boundary of its medical system. What's more, every medical personnel can obtain information and services — including those related to PACS and COVID-19 — through the network anytime and anywhere. This includes accessing, invoking, and backhauling pictures, videos, and relevant information about patients.
Huawei leverages its wired and wireless network prowess to connect the end-to-end clinical and service processes of American Hospital Dubai for automation, enabling the hospital to provide world-class medical services.
Mr. Ahmad Yahya, COO of American Hospital Dubai, gave the following reasons for choosing Huawei as a network partner: Huawei's high-performance data communication products meet strict SLA requirements in the medical field. They are not only powerful and reliable, but also rich in functionality. Through agile cooperation and integration with its ecosystem partners, Huawei is capable of providing end-to-end localized support across designing, migration, implementation, and after-sales. In this way, Huawei's overall solution helps us reduce both costs and TCO.
At the Arab Health 2022 conference, Mr. Sherif Beshara, CEO of American Hospital Dubai, pointed out that medical institutions urgently need to extend beyond diagnosis and treatment to prevention and prediction. Adhering to that idea, American Hospital Dubai has already made many breakthroughs in the use of big data and AI technologies. In addition to using AI robots for over 400 assisted surgeries, the hospital has also made many achievements related to COVID-19 and in-depth virtual nursing. This is a case in point that AI will become the leading force in medical transformation. However, intelligence can only be achieved with human-to-human, human-to-things, and things-to-things connectivity, as well as free communication. Only then can data aggregation and convergence be implemented so that AI technologies can be used to process massive data, thus benefiting the medical industry.
Dubai is a unique place where the desert meets the sea. The sea water winds its way through the heart of Dubai before disappearing off into the desert on the other end of the city. The name Dubai immediately evokes images for towering skyscrapers glistening in the sun, as well as palm trees swaying in the desert wind. As it pursues its own Dubai dream, Al Mulla Group always stays true to its core values: "We are passionate about making a positive impact" and "Do something today that will make tomorrow better". We believe that after American Hospital Dubai builds a fully-connected hospital on its digital transformation journey, it will provide better medical care for people, and contribute to making Dubai a world-class city adored by all.