Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health has adopted a multi-cloud system to modernize healthcare systems, aligning with the country’s aims and objectives enshrined under Vision 2030. Services hosted in the cloud allow public healthcare service providers to enhance their efficiency and enable healthcare professionals to innovate.
The necessity to upgrade the healthcare systems during Covid boosted the efforts of the Ministry to adopt the latest digital technologies, which helped the Ministry monitor vaccination campaigns and source patient records remotely.
The Health Ministry has deployed Cloud Foundation from VMWare, which helps reduce the burden on the Ministry as its services are distributed across clouds, including STC and Mobily. The platform unifies the Ministry’s different cloud applications and, at the same time, provides best-in-class solutions. The result is that efficiencies among various arms of the Ministry increase.
When the system, which is being implemented in phases, is deployed fully, Saudi Arabia’s healthcare will benefit from stability, resilience, and agility. Then, the Health Ministry can make use of the entire bouquet of software-defined services, like computing, storage, cloud management, network, Kubernetes, and security.
Going ahead, the Health Ministry is looking at deploying more advanced VMWare solutions, like Carbon Black for additional cybersecurity, VMWare Workspace One for secure and distributed working, and Tanzu for Kubernetes in vSphere. These advances will increase the capabilities of Ministry-linked professionals to develop applications in the cloud.
Saudi Arabia, populated by 348 million, has budgeted to spend $36.8 billion on social development, including healthcare, this financial year. With the threat of Covid ebbing, the budgetary allocation for the healthcare sector has come down from $50.9 billion to $36.8 billion, a drop of 27.7%, from 2021 to 2022.
The Health Ministry manages 274 hospitals, while the Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions another 60. The Emirate in all has 470 hospitals.
