Muneer Alam

Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs (MNG-HA)

Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs (MNGHA) is a government-funded multispecialty accountable health system spread all over Saudi Arabia. It integrates clinical care, training, academics with research and cutting-edge technology. The MNGHA was founded in 1982 with a vision of providing outstanding patient care to its eligible local population. The system has seen significant development and expansion across Saudi Arabia in the last few years, and it now has five medical cities, specialist hospitals, and numerous Primary Healthcare Centers. Despite its widespread geographic locations across Saudi Arabia, the organization carried out one of the largest and highly integrated deployments of a centralized Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. The centralized and paperless EMR system has allowed MNGHA to unify the patient records and achieve continuity of documents across all MNGHA facilities. More MNGHA specialist hospitals and health care centers are currently being developed to meet the increased demand for health while maintaining the focus on delivering effective, efficient, safe, and integrated care to its patients. The MNGHA proved to be a resilient health system by going through the challenging MERS-COV outbreak in 2015 and managing the current COVID-19 pandemic effectively. This experience led to a very successful and pioneering transformation of its patient flow, infection control, and emergency care. The MNGHA has the most developed health information system infrastructure globally, and it is the first organization to have reached the INFRaM-6 maturity level and tasked by the Royal Court to develop various artificial intelligence solutions for patient care. Establishing a University for Healthcare Sciences (King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences), King Abdullah International Medical Research Centre (KAIMRC), King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Arabic Health Encyclopedia (KAAHE), state-of-the-art simulation center, and the National and Gulf Center for Evidence-Based Health Practice (NGCEBHP) have incorporated academic and research dimensions into the outstanding clinical care and training programs.