Cerner Middle East and Africa / King’s College Hospital London

Zia Sayed

The UAE is witnessing a growth in the private healthcare sector. What does King’s College Hospital Dubai offer that makes them unique in their sector? 

Zia: King’s College Hospital Dubai (KCH) is a world-renowned teaching hospital in London with over 175 years’ experience, that is now present in the UAE. Our state-of-the-art multi-specialty medical centers are based in Jumeirah and Marina; and our new 100-bed multi-specialty tertiary hospital in the Dubai Hills estate.

Our facilities offer an extraordinary care experience that is aligned with the Dubai Health authorities and Kings London guidelines. We have a shared medical committee with our UK based clinical teams and our second opinion program delivers a seamless care for our UAE patients. We have a robust family medicine practice bringing a focus on holistic health and wellness programs in the UAE. The care provided is using the British standards as per national institute for health and care excellence in UK.

Our practice, vision and mission is aligned with the UAE healthcare vision 2021 in many aspects where we aim to be the most trusted private health care facility aligned with the world-class system in the UAE. We aim to provide coordinated care focused on improving patient outcomes, avoiding duplicate treatment and reducing costs while at the same time providing the best quality in health care. Our visiting Doctor’s program brings to the region the best expertise for the very specialized care services.

What does the patient experience at KCH look like and what are the current and future plans? 

Zia: Our patients and their families receive the best of British care, treated with the utmost dignity, respect and confidence. They truly are our number one priority. At the time of the arrival at the facility, patients are warmly welcomed and accompanied by caring Kingsman, to make sure they have a seamless journey at the hospital. Our great partnerships and investment in pharmacy, imaging, medical record and smart technologies are here to support the patient journey within our facility. By bringing world-leading experts in their field to the UAE every few weeks, we are able to offer patients world-class treatment and procedures in high prevalence areas. Our doctors are measured by the quality of care they provide. 

To further enhance our patient experience at KCH we will soon implement Emirates ID reader technology, which will assist us to reduce the patient waiting time at registration desk. In addition, soon we will have an integrated call center management system with traditional telephonic as well as social media channels touch points, which allows us to better answer any question that our callers may have. Our future plans is to integrate Cerner with wearable devices, so that we can proactively participate in general population health and wellness. 

Client Accountable Executive, Cerner Middle East and Africa

Romel Khalife

How does the digital transformation journey play a key role in aiming an extraordinary patient experience? 

Romel: The digital transformation journey at KCH has recently witnessed new aspects of hospital care to enhance the patient experience by deploying an electronic health record and other Smart technologies. 

As an intersection of innovation and partnerships, Cerner and KCH worked together to incorporate technology and workflow solutions to enhance patient care and introduce clinical efficiencies. The deployed technologies allow the hospitalized patients to be engaged throughout the care journey.   The hospital is equipped with an infotainment system that is fully integrated with Cerner; offering patients entertainment, up-to-date interactive information and education about their condition, all at the touch of their fingertips. 

The visiting patients can benefit from a Pharmacy end-to-end automated medication management process. This automated dispensing technology will only allow the dispense of a pharmacy product that was ordered by the physician for a specific patient. The barcode medication administration will allow the nurse to administer the prescribed medication to the right patient. The electronic prescribing ensures medication management is optimized and prescription is sent to the eRx platform with the prescription number in case the patient is willing to get it dispensed from any pharmacy in Dubai.  The combination of automated dispensing, barcoded medication administration and electronic prescribing made the medication management process safe, fully traceable and paperless at the point of care. In addition, KCH is also the first facility to have an automated medication management solution in the operating theatres, contributing towards patient safety. 

The electronic signature in a fully automated paperless environment reduce the time spent on handling administration of documents and streamline the patient admission and registration process. 

In your opinion, how does innovation and interoperability help advance the health care sector? 

Romel: As healthcare organizations face unprecedented challenges to improve quality, reduce harm, improve access, increase efficiency, eliminate waste, and lower costs, innovation and interoperability are becoming a major focus once again.

Innovation also means that new ways of service provision need to be established provide the tools, services, and visionary leadership in advancing this in an all-encompassing way, from population health management, over artificial intelligence, and towards providing the consumer with platforms to proactively manage their life and well-being. Additionally, industry is moving towards data-driven healthcare that can be defined as the effective use of vast amounts of data collected in the process of managing the health and wellbeing of millions of patients in a continuous effort to improve the quality, efficacy, and cost of care. 

The second main pillar in advancing the healthcare sector is interoperability, where exchange of information in healthcare, as with all other facets of modern life, is critical to our advancement. Interoperability addresses that need while simultaneously increasing the quality of care received, improving healthcare efficiency and even financial incentivization. Not having access to data points due to the lack of integrated healthcare IT systems is unsafe in terms of clinicians taking decisions without having access to the entire patient data at most and at the least extremely inconvenient for the patient.