The group of leading experts gathered virtually to discuss the importance of harnessing technology to gain health insights from data, and their findings were discussed on Day Two of the HIMSS21 Middle East session around 'Leveraging Data and Technology to Advance Population Health Management'. 

The session participants were: Dr Ada Al-Qunaibet, Director of Public Health Research and Health Statistics, Public Health Authority Saudi Arabia; Dr Charles Alessi, Chief Clinical Officer, HIMSS, UK; Dr LaMar Hasbrouck, Senior Advisor for Population Health and Care Management, Council of Cooperative Health Insurance, Saudi Arabia; and Dr Faisal Al-Refaei, Chief Operating Officer, Dasman Diabetes Institute, Kuwait. The moderator was Dr Nasser Aljehani, Model of Care Lead, Second Health Cluster, Saudi Arabia.

'The start of an explosion in population health management'

“There’s a focus now that I haven’t seen in years past…with Vision 2030, e-medicine and precision medicine, big data has come into focus and I think, from a perspective of science, it is definitely monumental, and very vital for what we need to infer, what we need to conclude, when it comes to proving hypotheses or disproving hypotheses,” said Al-Qunaibet from Public Health Authority Saudi Arabia.

Alessi believes population health management is about to change: “I think we really are at the start of an explosion in initiatives in population health management, really brought along by the pandemic that, of course, exacerbated a whole host of non-communicable disease as well, where life-long interventions are really at the heart of what we should be doing and clearly identifying these at a population level, before then going into it on a personal level.”

“We want to improve the population health for our 11 million beneficiaries over the course of five years by focusing on five conditions that we’ve deemed, based on our data, to be high burden and high cost, and these conditions are hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, smoking-related [disease] and obesity,” commented Hasbrouck.

According to Hasbrouk, the Population Health 5x5 program will leverage technology to identify care for patients with these long-term conditions. He said data from these special populations of interest will be poured into a registry where clinical data, laboratory data and cost data can be measured. Patients will then be offered customised care, based on the data.     

The costs of ignoring chronic disease

Al-Refaei believes it was a mistake to ignore chronic diseases during the pandemic: “It is very clear from research that has come out from multiple countries, that focusing on the pandemic and ignoring illnesses such as diabetes has actually cost us already, financially and healthcare outcome-based, much more than it cost us to put all our resources into the pandemic.”

“These are not diseases we can change overnight and so trying to have that slow steady input of data, and systems being able to absorb that data, is key…With these diseases, the problem is not like a pandemic or viruses; you can’t give a vaccine to treat obesity and you can’t give a vaccine to treat cardiovascular disease,” commented Al-Qunaibet.

Register now to listen to the session 'on demand' at HIMSS21 Middle East.