AFYA Arabia
Background
Afya Arabia is a smart care community based in Kuwait, aiming for care for all, wellness for all, and a healthcare
ecosystem for the Arab world.
Afya Arabia, as a pioneer in bringing social innovation in the field of healthcare in the MENA region,
anticipates the changing trends in the healthcare sector and adopts a holistic approach in transforming the way
healthcare is delivered. It is an elaborate healthcare ecosystem that encompasses Patients, Care-providers, and
Care-payers. The objective of this ecosystem is to provide an exclusive platform that brings together all
stakeholders of care under a common roof and help them achieve synergistic advantages by rendering, seeking,
optimizing and customizing healthcare services. Afya Arabia is a Kuwait-headquartered company whose primary
objective is care for all, wellness for all, healthy workforce, increased employability and healthy citizens.
Under Afya's leadership, this venture promotes an innovative initiative to build a healthcare ecosystem for the
Arab world that will have a strong connect with all the stakeholders as a secured, trusted and regional healthcare
service provider.
Business Needs & Challenges
It is imperative for the success of a Smart Healthcare solution to have quality patient data. In the absence of
such critical data, or having low-quality patient data, the quality of service gets impacted negatively. AFYA
Arabia realized this challenge early in the process of implementing their solution. There is, however, a paradox.
Data entry is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Healthcare Providers who opted not to capture adequate
patient demographics did not experience this issue albeit at the expense of the quality of patient data. On the
other hand, Healthcare Providers who opted to spend considerable effort in data entry improved the quality of
patient demographic data, at the expense of inefficient patient treatment.
Characteristics of a viable solution
A viable solution needs to provide the following capabilities:
-
Capture Patient Demographics as accurately and efficiently as possible, without forcing data entry
clerks to enter too much detail.
- Make no compromises in terms of patient data quality.
Solution
Afya Arabia teamed with Sharper Software to provide
Smart Civil ID reader for
every subscribed healthcare service provider. Sharper Software delivers a suitable reader, installs it and
trains the end users on how to use the technology. All patient-facing data entry clerks have to do is insert
a patient's Smart Civil ID into the reader and press a button on AFYA Arabia's web page. The patient's
demographics, including name in both English and Arabic, Sex, Date of Birth, Blood Group, Nationality,
Address, etc. are all captured automatically off the Smart Civil ID and displayed on AFYA Arabia's web page.
This saves the time required to have a no-compromise patient data accuracy. Since this information is
maintained by the Public Authority for Civil Information, all such data is according to the official records.
This serves as a good measure against repudiation.
