Saudi Vision 2030 & GHE 2024: where the tech revolution and health re/insurance meet

Health re/insurance has been a blind spot for me, as a journalist focused on the global re/insurance business. Health tends to be bundled with life insurance, and therefore relatively ignored for those of us focused on non-life property and casualty re/insurance business.

In the Middle East, health is an enormous growth industry and a compulsory line of business in several countries across the region, meaning it is a growth engine for re/insurance penetration and reducing the protection gap across the Arab World.

In a freelance capacity, I recently took on a project for a friend who works in the health and technology events business. The Global Health Exhibition (GHE) was held in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on 21-23 October, with major emphases on the investment and technology happening within this Middle East growth sector.

GHE 2024 was attended by 105,000 people over three days; making it the fastest growing health event in the world. I found it an eye-opener for health technology trends and also in anticipating demand for health re/insurance, as the sector grows in the region.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is a vastly ambitious government-led economic strategy for the decade. It seeks to diversify the Saudi economy from its historically dominant energy sector, repositioning it as a regional or global leader within several other industries, from tourism and sports, to technology and healthcare.

The need for re/insurance was omnipresent during three days of healthcare speaker presentations and panels at GHE, particularly when discussing technology. Statements like “of course, we’ll have to bring our insurers on board for this to happen” were repeated more times than I could count, but without much elaboration about when or how.

On day one, Saudi Arabia’s health minister, H.E. Fahad bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel, took the stage to reveal health sector investments that cumulatively exceeded some SAR 50bn ($13bn). Saudi private health insurance has reached a market size of SAR 40bn ($10.7bn), Al-Jalajel observed, with more than 12 million people insured in 2023, quadrupled from three million people insured in 2011.

“We aim to position Saudi Arabia as a hub for addressing current and future global challenges, following a unified government approach under Vision 2030,” he said.

One headline project of Saudi Vision 2030 has been the Virtual Health Hospital, which launched two years ago, and has entered the Guinness World Records as the world’s largest virtual hospital.

“People’s minds are open towards innovation, which drives the transformation,” said Dr Sana Khan, director of Prince Sultan University’s extended reality programme. “Saudi Arabia is home to the largest virtual hospital in the world; and its entire system connects hospitals across the country; and that is one of the most successful use cases.”

On a panel on harnessing the power of digitised data, Khan observed that innovation continues in different directions, and that virtual reality programmes, for instance, have found applications across patient care, pain management, physiotherapy, as well as teaching and education, all of which was accelerated by the experience of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Doctor Feras Khaliel, a consultant in cardiac surgery at King Faisal Hospital, is responsible for connecting the country’s National Heart Center with its Virtual Hospital project, connecting every high-risk patient case across the country to decide on medical treatments.

In 2024, a live-stream connected King Faisal Hospital with 600 cardiac surgeons at 300 hospitals virtually, as Khaliel performed complex robotic heart surgery.

“Cardiac surgeons were not only observing but in constant communication with me on the live stream to ask questions,” he said.

“We have harvested technology and innovation devices to advance the health system to achieve a better outcome for the patient…and soon we will talk about how we would implement artificial intelligence into high risk patient selection, which will probably lead us into robotic heart transplant patients,” Khaliel added.

The future of healthcare, 20 and even 30 years ahead, was a topic for Dr Reenita Das, author of “State of Femtech”, and a partner for healthcare and life sciences at Frost & Sullivan.

She emphasised that a combination of accessible technology and lifestyle consumerism mean that one billion smartphone users – one in seven people globally – already have the applications available to them to track all manner of health indicators.

“We’re moving towards what I call the ‘IKEA-ization of healthcare. Every individual will become the CEO of his health or her health, and manage their health based on these wearables and apps. We’re going to become ‘quantified consumers’, empowered to take ownership of our own health.”

This focus on data, analysed with greater use of artificial intelligence (AI), is changing the role of the hospital, she suggested. “The hospital is a central part of the system, but it’s going to collect data; it’s going to be an intelligent hospital. All the data you have collected from your body from all these different channels will then be used when going to the hospital.”

Das offered some global health predictions ahead as far out as 2050. “Unsurprisingly, AI will become ubiquitous,” she said. “By 2050, we will begin to see that all 8 billion of us will have a Health Risk Assessment platform built for ourselves. We already have a Digital Twin, which you heard about on the first day here. This will all be wearable, integrated, and we should own the data.”