A Final Post from Riyadh (for now)

Yesterday was a fairly busy day for me, being the last day of a 10-day trip to Saudi Arabia.  Last week I spoke at KSU on eHealth Standards (I'll update the link for the slides when I get it).  Yesterday I attended a seminar organized by the Saudi Association for Health Informatics held at King Fahad Medical City.  To topic of the lecture was Innovation, and the presenter was Dr. Bassam Al Hemsi, an OHSU Alumna.  Dr. Al Hemsi had invited me to the lecture that afternoon, and it was a tight squeeze, but due to the kindess of an MOH employee (Dr. Ayman BafaQeeh), I was able to attend.  The kindness and hospitality of the Saudi's I have met here is quite overwhelming.

Dr. Al Hemsi has an extensive history in Healthcare and IT, including 5 major facilities in Saudi and as CIO of the National Guard's health system.  He is a surgeon, informaticist and educator, and an innovator in his own right.  The key point of his presentation was to describe what it would take for Saudi to become an innovator in Health IT.  He talked about how People + Processes + Information + Technology become products and services, and illustrated some of his own work in the field.  He emphasized the difference between a Leader and a Boss, and emphasized the importance of being the latter to his audience.  He also emphasized the need to do, and even to make mistakes as being important to developing the skills necessary to succeed.  I quite enjoyed his presentation, even as I recalled the many mistakes I have made in my career that taught me so much.

I got to spend some time with Dr. Al Hemsi at his clinic before the presentation, where he kindly showed me some of the innovative things he had designed for use in his Hemodialysis Clinic.  It was pretty cool stuff. The most impressive item was a 110" multi-touch display he had built, including the software his team had designed to make use of it, but he has also designed several medical devices and innovative software using a digital pen for data capture that he also uses in his clinic.

Dr. Al Hemsi is a good speaker, and his audience was quite engaged in the topic.  It was very clear to me, especially in the educational settings that I have been in over the past ten days that the current crop of Health Informatics students and practitioners in Saudi are quite enthusiastic about eHealth and Standards.

   Keith

Seven Hours ahead and Way Behind ...

on Blog posts.

This has been a very busy week.  Once again I'm in Saudi Arabia, and as usual, my days are packed with day job work on developing Saudi standards, and my evenings hours reserved for conference calls with the US, and late hours are spent preparing for the next day and way to late hours for school work.

I was privileged to be a member of the Faculty presenting at King Saud University for the closure of their inaugural AMIA i10x10 program, teaching alongside my academic adviser Dr. William (Bill) Hersh. You can see a picture of the distinguished faculty and students involved in the program in the image below.

At the back row is Dr. Hersh in the blue suit and tie.  Next to him on the left is Dr. Amr Jamal, head of the program for King Saud.  And then me, again in my thobe (which was quite a hit with students and faculty both).  I think some few didn't recognize me until I put on my motorcycle vest, thinking I was a Saudi national ;-)

I attended the entire day and was quite interested to hear from other presenters about the Saudi Ministry of Health's eHealth program from several different perspectives.  Leading off the day was Russel Gann, formerly involved with CDC programs in the US, and just recently finishing a stint with the Saudi CDC.  He spoke to the students about the complexities of population health and the need for informatics understanding in the country.

I followed him, and spoke about the standard program in Saudi and their use of HL7 standards and IHE profiles.  The standards presently under development include HL7 Version 2, Version 3, and Clinical Document Architecture Release 2, and also include IHE profiles.  This I presented with my OHSU student hat on.  I figuratively switched to my HL7 Ambassador hat, presenting the CDA Ambassador presentation to the students and faculty so they would understand what CDA and CCD could do for eHealth.  Finally I put my IHE hat on to present what IHE was.  Lastly, I returned to my student hat and put it all together to explain why these standards and organizations were important to the students.  Many of the students expressed a deep interest in the formation of an HL7 Saudi Affiliate, and were also interested in participating in the work of the MoH supporting healthcare interoperability in the Kingdom.

Dr. Hersh gave the students a brief overview of the AMIA 10x10 history, talking about how the program came about and how the international edition emerged as a result.  We also heard several award winning student presentations after his talk.  Afterwards, there was a presentation of awards and certificates.

The day was completed by Dr. Ahmed Belkhair who spoke about the Saudi eHealth strategy.  He also presented on this topic at the most recent HIMSS conference in Orlando last month.  Dr. Balkhair's department is leading the standards efforts in Saudi Arabia, and he also has the honor to be the HL7 Saudi chair.

Later in the week I joined Dr. Hersh, Dr. Jamal, and several other distinguished faculty from the University for a dinner at Najdi Village Restaurant.  I felt quite privileged to attend the dinner, and hope to have a meal there again.  Dr. Jamal, our host was quite gracious with his attention.  I hope to have the opportunity to return again to King Saud to teach again in the future, Insh'allah.

Signing off from Riyadh (but still here for a few more days).  I'll be taking my OHSU finals from here again this weekend, as I did in December, so I must go study now.

   Keith

Old Friends and New

This is the fourth time this year I've been to Riyadh.  Briefly, I'm working with the Ministry of Health on their National e-Health Strategy.  It's a huge initiative in this country, with a very long term vision and lofty goals. As part of this project, I've be doing workshops on standards, and how to use them to meet some of those goals with various physicians, nurses and other healthcare and IT professionals.  If you look at the first picture on the link above, and find the Enterprise Standards and Profiles component, I'm working right in the middle of that part of it.  It is extremely interesting and demanding work, especially as you see all of the the various timelines shown in the image below. Imagine having to herd all of those cats.

If I had one think to say about the team who is working with us, its like "Dude, we're getting the band back together."  I get to work again on a national program with many of my friends from HITSP and who have also been working on regional and national and international programs elsewhere.  But in addition to old friends, I've also made some new ones:

Me with the Saudi Healthcare Standards Team

Yes, that's me in a thobe in the middle wearing traditional Saudi garb, next to the Chief Architect also in the middle, with two of the Standards Specialists (a new role in the Ministry I imagine) on either side.  

You may wonder, especially those of you who work in standards where the Middle East and Africa are in Healthcare standards.  Well, they are coming, and these gentlemen are leading the way.  I hope to introduce you to them someday at an IHE or HL7 meeting.