The Ministry of Public Health in Qatar has published its National Health Strategy 2024 – 2030, focused on the three areas of population health, service delivery, and health system efficiency, which reflect “remaining challenges” for Qatar including standardising integrated patient pathways and “fully digitising” the health system.
The strategy looks at advancing the health system’s efficiency and resilience, highlighting the importance of digitisation and data availability, along with workforce upskilling, research, and “coordinated system planning” across both public and private sectors.
A barrier the strategy outlines to progress in this regard is “limited digitisation across the system”, with the majority of providers reportedly not yet having transformed their data collection and availability practices in order to enable “national level health analytics solutions and inform planning and decision making across the whole of the system”.
When it comes to service delivery and the patient experience, the Ministry highlights challenges including the level of trust in the quality of care, a lack of integration between primary care and acute care “resulting in non-standardised patient journeys and poor experiences”, and “inconsistent” use of evidence-based approaches to “modernising care delivery and design of patient pathways”.
The future model of service delivery, according to the strategy, looks like modernised and holistic care models and pathways, integration across care settings, and improved patient experience and access.
Looking to improve the health service’s efficiency and resilience, the strategy sets out plans to overcome issues with the availability of “consistent” data and “low user satisfaction” with existing digital platforms, as well as the lack of a unified data lake and “low capitalisation on the AI revolution”.
Introducing new digital solutions to deliver new models of care; consolidating sources of data, data governance, and analytics capabilities; and creating a “thriving R&D ecosystem” with the policies, funding, talent and infrastructure required to drive innovation; are all listed as priorities for the coming years.
To read the 2024 – 2030 strategy in full, please click here.
The Malian government has also published its strategic plan for national digital health 2024 – 2028, aiming to “improve accessibility, quality, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of national health systems”, focusing on “seamless connectivity”, “continuous access to health information”, enhancing coverage in remote or rural areas, and strengthening emergency response.
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