To Democratize Healthcare, We Must Democratize Innovation

In a HIMSS21 Global Conference Digital session, experts weigh in on the hurdles to equitable software creation in the current tech landscape.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) have been at the heart of the King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre’s (KFSH&RC) response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia, accelerating a digital transformation journey that has been underway since the start of the 21st century.

The rapid development of a highly integrated COVID-19 digital support machine learning platform, using predictive analytics to optimise the hospital’s operational response and patient care delivery, has been a game-changing experience for the organisation – and in particular, for the Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) team led by CIO Dr Osama Alswailem.

“The hospital as an organisation is transitioning from ‘smart’ to ‘intelligent’ systems,” says Alswailem. “Before the pandemic, we were already moving from interoperability, data warehousing and simple analytics into more machine learning projects from genomics to 3D printing. When COVID happened, we shifted our focus from the defined use cases that we had into a platform that could use real-time, multi-dimensional data to enable focused organisational decisions.”

Adapting to the uncertainties of a rapidly developing pandemic demanded a platform that could be integrated with every internal and external operational and clinical function, including the hospital’s Integrated Clinical Information System (ICIS), bringing real-time data to care providers and administrators so that decisions could be made and resources such as beds and devices allocated based on the latest