Saudi German Health is a private healthcare group operating hospitals, specialist clinics and other healthcare services across the Middle East and North Africa. Founded in Jeddah in 1988, the network has expanded to more than 20 medical facilities and serves around 2.5 million patients annually. Its activities span tertiary and specialist care, outpatient services, home healthcare and medical education.
Saudi German Health has historically grown through new hospitals. What defines the next phase of expansion?
Previously, growth largely meant physical expansion: building a new greenfield hospital every year or year and a half. We are now present across much of the Middle East, so the next phase is different. It is about expanding within services and subspecialties, including precision medicine, predictive medicine, longevity and highly specialized care. In Dubai, we are developing centers of excellence in areas including pediatrics, trauma and proctology surgery.
The other dimension is technology. We are moving toward what I would call the invisible hospital: ambient sensors, wearables, remote follow-up for chronic patients, telehealth and a mobile app that brings together more of the patient journey. AI can also help us become more proactive by identifying risks before complications occur. Ultimately, the objective is twofold: make care accessible, affordable and effortless for patients, while shifting medicine toward prevention, continuous monitoring and earlier intervention. The principle is to take established excellence and embed it into everyday clinical practice—because quality should not depend on which physician, department or facility a patient happens to encounter. It has to become a property of the system.
Why do you believe the UAE is particularly well placed to attract more international patients?
The country already has much of the infrastructure required for medical tourism: accessibility, safety, digitalization and rapid adoption of innovation. You can have excellent medicine, but if patients cannot easily reach the country, that creates an immediate barrier. In the UAE, accessibility is a major advantage.
The second factor is the speed at which new treatments, technologies and medications are adopted. The third is the diversity of the population. Within our organization alone, we have more than 100 nationalities. Patients can often find someone who speaks their language and understands their cultural background. That matters because people tend to feel safer when there is familiarity, and the UAE has created an environment in which many different nationalities and ethnicities coexist within the same healthcare system.
How does Batterjee Medical City change the traditional hospital model?
The traditional model was the general tertiary hospital: a facility designed to manage complex cases, emergency care and advanced treatment. We are now moving toward an institutional model in which the hospital is one part of a broader medical city. Batterjee Medical City brings together a tertiary hospital, centers of excellence and medical education within the same environment.
That means a medical student can train alongside the hospital, while postgraduate physicians can progress through residency and board programs. We also have other healthcare capabilities within the wider group, including a construction company focused on healthcare facilities and an IT arm dedicated to healthcare. The idea is to create a comprehensive model in which education, clinical care, specialist services and supporting infrastructure are connected rather than operating in silos.
What is changing clinically through your relationship with international partners and your investment in precision medicine?
If you want to adopt the best models, you do not reinvent the wheel. We have an agreement with international partners and collaborators to bring best practices into our hospitals, working department by department and adapting clinical practice guidelines across the organization. The principle is to take established excellence and embed it into everyday clinical practice.
At the same time, we are part of the UAE’s national genomics initiative. The future will increasingly be genomics-driven and tailored to the individual. Oncology is an obvious area because of advances in targeted gene therapies, but I also see significant potential in neurology and, eventually, diabetes and endocrine disease. Diabetes creates complications across the heart, brain, nervous system and many other parts of the body. If we can fundamentally change that disease pathway, the impact on complications and quality of life could be enormous.
As patients present with multiple complex conditions, how can subspecialty care prevent fragmented treatment?
Healthcare begins with symptoms, but symptoms do not necessarily tell you the root cause. A patient may come with dizziness, for example, and simply treating the dizziness will not resolve the underlying problem. It might come from the middle ear, the central nervous system, a peripheral cause or something else entirely. That is why we have developed services such as a dedicated dizziness clinic, where the aim is to identify the real cause rather than provide temporary symptom relief.
If you solve the underlying problem, you reduce repeat symptoms, complications, unnecessary investigations and future costs, while improving quality of life. It also prevents patients from moving from one clinic to another without resolution. Education is part of this as well. We have created an independent patient-education platform with more than 300 videos produced by our doctors, with the aim of reaching 1,000 or more, so patients can better understand where to seek the right care.
Where are AI and digital tools making the clearest difference in everyday care?
For me, AI should be human-centered. Its purpose is to give clinicians more time with patients. Healthcare is not simply a data exchange; it depends on empathy, listening and human interaction. If a patient says they have pain or dizziness, that can mean many different things. Understanding it properly requires questions, probing and active listening.
At the same time, modern healthcare involves enormous documentation requirements, particularly around insurance, coding and coverage. We are adopting tools that can capture the conversation, populate the required documentation, identify missing investigations and highlight information needed for insurance. The doctor can then review and verify the final output instead of manually entering everything. If AI gives clinicians more time to listen, it can strengthen trust and improve the patient-clinician relationship.
As you expand further into subspecialty care, what is the biggest workforce constraint?
It is fundamentally a supply-and-demand problem. The more specialized the field, the greater the scarcity. Finding a clinician who is academically strong is not enough; there can still be a gap between academic knowledge and practical capability. The same issue exists across nursing, paramedical services and other healthcare support roles, where demand continues to outstrip supply.
Technology will therefore have to help compensate for scarce resources. We may see more virtual nursing, automated monitoring, digital auditing and AI-supported workflows. But AI should remain a copilot, not the pilot. Human validation will still be necessary because healthcare depends on context, culture and interaction, and the technological infrastructure is not the same across every institution, city or country. The future is not healthcare with fewer humans. It is healthcare where technology gives humans more capacity to do what only humans can do.
