Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing healthcare delivery by offering innovative solutions to age-old challenges related to diagnostics, disease prevention, and care delivery. At the first-ever Digital Health & AI Forum during Arab Health 2025, prominent experts in AI innovation engaged in discussions about its transformative influence on enhancing patient outcomes.
Digital Health & AI Forum highlights AI’s growing importance
Anchored under the theme ‘Connected health solutions: Unlocking the AI and digital health potential’, this one-day forum underscored how AI is emerging as a crucial instrument in contemporary medicine.
Ross Williams, senior exhibition director at Informa Markets, remarked: “Arab Health continues to serve as a global platform for showcasing transformative technologies. The Digital Health & AI Forum has demonstrated the immense potential of AI to revolutionise patient care and improve outcomes. Meanwhile, The Future Health Summit will further these vital conversations by bringing together world leaders to explore groundbreaking advancements.”
Read more: Arab Health 2025 kicks off to showcase latest innovations transforming modern healthcare
AI tools enhancing patient insights
AI-driven technologies, including predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms, are aiding clinicians in gathering patient insights to elevate patient outcomes. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) discovered that AI systems could detect diseases from medical images with an accuracy of up to 94 percent.
Speaking during the forum, Dr. David Rhew, global chief medical officer and VP of Healthcare at Microsoft, stated: “One example of how AI is enabling better patient care involves AI applied on retinal images to diagnose diabetic retinopathy and potentially other diseases, including cardiovascular, neurovascular, and ophthalmologic conditions. In addition, agentic AI has enabled automated image capture, meaning that image capture devices could potentially be placed in primary care clinics, retail stores, schools, and malls.”
Future of AI in healthcare
In the next decade, AI is poised to revolutionize healthcare by enhancing personalized care, promoting disease prevention, and boosting operational efficiency. AI-powered tools will enable both patients and providers to make better-informed decisions, facilitating early disease identification and improving efficiency through risk stratification, data triage, and targeted resource allocation.
Dr. Rhew also pointed out that the adoption of AI necessitates overcoming challenges such as workflow disruptions. “If the AI slows the clinician down, adds more work for the clinician, or is not easy to use, clinicians will not adopt it. Conversely, AI that makes the clinician more efficient, reduces administrative tasks, and is seamless is likely to be well adopted.”
“We are already seeing this with ambient clinician intelligence (ACI). ACI captures the conversation between a patient and a clinician, seamlessly converts the conversation into a clinician note, and enables integration of the note into the electronic health record (EHR),” he added.
Upcoming events in AI and healthcare
The Digital Health & AI Forum sets the groundwork for a more profound exploration of AI’s transformative role in healthcare at The Future Health Summit, scheduled for 30 January 2025 at the Museum of the Future in Dubai. This exclusive gathering will unite senior government officials, healthcare executives, and technology leaders from prestigious organizations such as Google, GE HealthCare, Amazon Web Services, and PureHealth, among others, to discuss the potential of AI in shaping global healthcare systems.
Arab Health’s 50th-anniversary celebrations will continue on 28, 29, and 30 January 2025 at the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC). With over 3,800 exhibitors from more than 70 countries and an anticipated attendance exceeding 60,000 healthcare visitors, this event reinforces its significance on the regional economy and health sector as the largest and most influential healthcare event and congress in the region.
