A Case of Saudi Arabia
To address the increasingly aging population, rising healthcare costs, and inadequate coverage, the Saudi government has launched a comprehensive healthcare reform effort.
Under the auspices of Saudi Vision 2030, the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH) has unveiled new programs aimed at enhancing the delivery of healthcare and cutting costs. These programs include automation, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), digitization, and data twins, which are among the most promising innovations.
This blog article will examine the ways in which digital twins are transforming the Saudi Arabian healthcare industry and examine the prospects for future expansion in this field. We’ll also look at a few of the issues that need to be resolved in order for digital twin technology to realize its full promise.
What is the digital twin, people wonder?
For practical purposes, such as simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance, a digital twin is a digital representation of an intended or actual physical product, system, or process (a physical twin) that functions as its nearly identical digital counterpart.
IoT and virtualization tool developments have served as inspiration for digital twin technology, which is what has made it so popular and relevant across a range of industries.
Without digital twins, smart campuses and cities cannot be fully realized. These days, facial recognition algorithms can be utilized to identify and recognize individuals utilizing digital twins. Digital twins can also be used to evaluate the infrastructure’s safety in smart cities. With digital twins, new services, including multimedia, can be tried.
Digital Twin: A “twin” is a model of a physical thing that allows you to remotely diagnose problems, test fixes, and keep track of its condition.
The Digital Twin’s Function in Healthcare:
The healthcare sector is always looking for ways to improve patient outcomes, cut expenses, and deal with unanticipated medical emergencies. By giving real-time data on a patient’s development, digital twin technology can minimize bed shortages, maximize equipment utilization, increase patient turnaround, and decrease patient wait times. By identifying workflow bottlenecks and optimizing scheduling, it helps customize medications based on this data and enhance the operational efficiency and performance of healthcare companies.
The Top 5 Uses of Digital Twins in Medical Fields
By building useful virtual models using data from wearable technology, patient records, medication and pharmaceutical firms, device manufacturers, and other healthcare departments, digital twins facilitate the clinical and caregiving processes. The following are five uses for medical digital twins:
- Tailor medication administration and therapies:
By utilizing precision medicine, digital twins enable doctors, hospitals, and clinics to provide patient-centered treatment. Digital twins can be created using data recorded in wearables, fitness trackers, medical software, healthcare mobile apps, and other medical devices. Using AI-powered anatomy analysis and virtual models of heart disorders over time, medical professionals and front-line healthcare workers can use this data to treat patients with chronic or life-threatening conditions and get insight into how heart diseases grow over time.
In order to study neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, researchers are also testing digital twins.
- Planning ahead for advanced surgical procedures:
Brain and heart surgeons can perform virtual simulations of surgical operations before performing difficult surgeries thanks to digital twin technology. By evaluating pre- and post-operative surgical techniques and results on a digital reproduction of human body parts, this process lowers the possibility of negatively impacting human health. High-tech, patient-specific computer models of human organs aid in the more accurate planning and augmentation of difficult surgical procedures.
- Boost the effectiveness and knowledge of caregivers:
Using digital twins, one may see how patient data is kept and utilized for various medical purposes. Technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) aid in data inference and patient medical history summarization. By adding patient-specific data to your medical dashboard, you can monitor how patients are being treated according to their individual circumstances. Your capacity for making clinical decisions is enhanced by this.
- Examine novel medications and medical equipment:
Artificial intelligence is used by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to assess the efficacy and safety of pilot medications. By simulating the health characteristics of a greater number of patients, digital twins can be used to assess how the use of a drug will affect a broader population. AI determines patients’ availability and willingness to participate in drug trials using multiple inclusion and exclusion scenarios. A new drug’s development and introduction into the market require more than $2 billion;
the trial phase alone is quite expensive, and more than 90% of therapies fail during this time. Utilizing advances in technology such as computational modeling and machine learning speeds up theearly phases of medication creation, design, and safety assessment through the integration of test results from different samples.
- Increase the adaptability of the supply chain:
Due to transportation restrictions, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic undermined our supply lines and caused a lack of critical medical supplies. With digital twins, healthcare institutions may increase bed capacity and handle emergencies during shutdowns or shortages, enabling them to develop strong contingency plans to deal with such unforeseen circumstances. Redesigning supply chain partnerships can help hospitals, labs, and other healthcare facilities develop alternate plans, enhance supplier participation, and coordinate planning and negotiation with authorities.
Saudi Arabia’s transition to digital health:
By altering the way health services are delivered and bringing in new patient care modalities, health information technology has contributed to significant developments in the healthcare industry. In an environment that is so dynamic and changing quickly, the health care business as a specialized profession cannot thrive without investing in the continued development of digital health infrastructure and adopting new and innovative technologies at a faster pace.
Rapid socioeconomic development has occurred in Saudi Arabia, which has resulted in significant changes in public health goals and comprehensive health reform. The previous ten years have seen an increase in the budget and investment in healthcare, indicating the ongoing rise in the need for healthcare in Saudi Arabia.
According to Trade.gov, Saudi Arabia bears the primary responsibility for 60% of the healthcare spending in the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the government continues to place a high premium on this area. Saudi Arabia allocated around US$36.8 billion, or 14.4% of its overall budget, on social development and healthcare in 2022.
In order to achieve its goals of privatizing 290 hospitals and 2,300 primary health centers, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia intends to invest US$66.67 billion in healthcare infrastructure and increase private sector participation from the current 40% to 65% by 2030, according to a report released by Mashreq and Frost & Sullivan.
The Kingdom’s population is predicted to increase from 34.3 million in 2019 to 39.4 million by 2030, and life expectancy is predicted to rise from 76.4 to 81.8 years by 2050. As a result, increased investment in infrastructure and innovation is anticipated to fuel significant growth in the healthcare sector in the Kingdom.
To achieve patients’ goals and objectives, digital reinvention in healthcare entails a fundamental rethinking of how a healthcare institution interacts with patients and other stakeholders – MOH, Saudi Vision 2030
Digital twin technology’s advantages for Saudi Arabia’s healthcare system
Although the application of digital twin technology in Saudi Arabian healthcare is still in its infancy, there are several possible advantages. Among the advantages that have been observed thus far are:
· Precision medicine: By building a digital image of a patient, medical professionals may diagnose and treat conditions with greater accuracy.
Decreased expenses: By streamlining procedures and getting rid of waste, digital twins can assist in lowering healthcare costs.
· Better patient care: By offering real-time data on patients’ ailments, the usage of digital twins can contribute to better patient care.
As digital twin technology advances, there are a plethora of further potential advantages for Saudi Arabian healthcare that we can only begin to envision.
Applications of Digital Twin Technology in Saudi Medical Fields
Digital twin technology has a wide range of possible applications in the Saudi Arabian healthcare industry. Among the most well-known are:
Training with Virtual Reality: Healthcare practitioners can train new hires or retrain seasoned employees using virtual reality. Since the training can be completed remotely and doesn’t need the healthcare experts to be there in person, it’s a time- and money-saving method.
· Patient Monitoring: Remote patient monitoring is possible with digital twins. This can assist lower the amount of hospital visits by enabling medical staff to monitor a patient’s condition even when they are not there.
· Pharmaceutical Research: By modeling the effects of drugs on the human body, digital twins can be exploited. This can guarantee that drugs are evaluated on human cells before being tried on humans, as well as hasten the research process.
Opportunities and Difficulties of Saudi Arabia’s Digital Twin Technology Implementation
The healthcare industry in Saudi Arabia is now dealing with a number of issues, including an aging population, an increase in chronic illnesses, and a shortage of highly qualified medical professionals. The industry may profit from a number of opportunities at the same time, including the rise in digitalization and the rising need for healthcare services.
Digital twin technology is one of the tools that Saudi Arabia’s healthcare sector can use to take advantage of some of these benefits and overcome some of these obstacles. A virtual duplicate of a real system or object that may be used to track and improve its performance is called a “digital twin.” Digital twins can be utilized in the healthcare industry to improve resource allocation, simulate treatments, and model and forecast patient behavior.
Before digital twin technology can be successfully applied in the Saudi Arabian healthcare industry, a number of obstacles must be removed. These include the high setup and maintenance costs associated with a digital twin infrastructure, the absence of standards, and the shortage of medical professionals with the necessary skills to deploy digital twin technology.
NEOM: The Health of the Future
You can see that the healthcare industry has a lot of promise for digital twin technology, and NEOM is one of the most ambitious projects in this direction. The goal of this initiative is to use digital twin technology to make the future safer and healthier for the people of Saudi Arabia.
NEOM is a futuristic city created with the intention of using digital twins to enhance healthcare services. Prominent entities like Microsoft, Siemens, and Honeywell have already expressed interest in collaborating on the creation of this innovative metropolis.
The goal of the project is to create an intelligent medical device network that is integrated with the digital twin concept. Medical information, including test results, vital signs, and patient records, will be gathered and disseminated among healthcare providers via this network in order to facilitate quicker diagnosis and treatment decisions. Together with quicker access to information and therapies, this network also promises improved patient engagement.
In summary
In conclusion, Saudi healthcare providers and patients can greatly benefit from the use of digital twins. They can assist in lowering expenses, speeding up the time to market for new goods and services, enhancing patient satisfaction, and improving the quality and accuracy of data.
Digital twins can be utilized to enhance patient happiness, save costs, decrease the time to market for new goods and services, and increase data quality and accuracy. Healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia should take these advantages into account.
