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Dubai: Experts discuss ways to harness collaboration in medical sector

Dubai - Healthcare sector experts talk about positive impacts of collaboration at India-UAE-Israel Economic Summit in Dubai.

Experts from healthcare sector on Monday discussed the positive impacts of collaboration in the medical sector at a panel discussion during the India-UAE-Israel Economic Summit on Tuesday.

Talking about the potential of healthcare collaborations across the three countries, Dr Malathi Arshanapalai, group chief of medical services, Aster DM Healthcare, UAE, said: “Covid took us by surprise. As chief of medical services for my group, that operates in India and the UAE, knowledge-sharing greatly benefited us. Since there was a time-lag with the surge happening first in the UAE and then India, our teams in India began preparing in advance after seeing the onset of the pandemic in the UAE. We were quick enough to learn from how things unfolded in UAE and transfer this knowledge when it started in India. We had a lot of experiential learning. Starting from simple material things like use of PPE to learning from guidelines and protocols became extremely essential.”

Dr Malathi said: “Collaboration between countries leads to phenomenal knowledge sharing — which includes components from experts and expertise. Such collaborations also help us in giving importance to infrastructure and learn about the best of infrastructure between the hospitals; and the important factor that came in handy was technology.

"Our database of human resource and patient info would be far lesser if our two countries — India and Israel — had not collaborate. This database forms the foundation for the development of AI, which is going to be the future of every country. It will be the success story of healthcare and will help in the decision-making process.”

Aviram Suchard, general manager & CEO Philips Electronics, Israel, said: “Digital pathology has helped us diagnose diseases from far; consult doctors from the US, Israel, India. This promises better treatment to patients. Using technology at Philips, we have collaborations where you can have access to over 300 doctors for the best treatment... this helps us to smash borders and give people more accurate treatment in shorter time, and enables us to serve more people.”

Other panelists included Abhishekh Sharma, CEO, Foundation Holdings, UAE; Prof Tarif Bader, CEO, Kaplan Medical Center, Israel; Faizal E. Kottikollon, chairman, KEF Holdings, UAE; and Aviram (Avi) Suchard, general manager & CEO Philips Electronics; also discussed on ways such as digitisation as steps towards building new bridges between the three countries.