Hamad bin Khalifa University

Thought leaders and experts in healthcare digitisation from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and beyond gathered during the 2022 HIMSS Middle East Health Conference & Exhibition for three days of world-class education and programming. Held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from 19 to 21 November, the event concluded with a promising proposed roadmap to reimagine the future of healthcare. In her closing remarks relating to conference recommendations, Dr. Taghreed Justinia, Regional Director for IT Services, Technology and Health Informatics at the King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, as well as a HIMSS Future 50 Healthcare IT Leader and HIMSS Blockchain Taskforce Member, outlined to the audience a series of recommendations under five themes. TEN CONFERENCE RECOMMENDATIONS Under the first theme “Digital Health: Transformation in Action”, Dr. Justinia reiterated the importance of long-term strategy and investment, stating: “Under the first theme, [HIMSS22 Midde East’s] first recommendation [is to] design digital transformation strategies in which governance is seen as a continuous and iterative process [that is] built into services and workflows from the start and throughout. “Next, we [also] recommend enhancing the capabilities and abilities necessary for data privacy, security, and resilience through long-term investment and infrastructure, [as well as] software, technology, and human capital.” With the second theme covering “Integration Through Data and Technology”, Dr. Justinia explained that HIMSS22 Middle East’s recommendation roadmap was to “develop national and regional policies to govern the use of health data, assuring privacy and protection, with the focus on safer care when integrating health services.” She continued: “We [also] recommend building robust IT systems that can provide accountable and sustainable care by integrating data between multiple stakeholders across regional and national platforms.” DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH TO SERVICE DELIVERY Under the third theme of “Digital Health: Impacts and Benefits,” Dr. Justinia stated that HIMSS22 Middle East recommended the region create “country-wide registries with coded, structured data and data standards, to identify patients and to manage disease. “We also recommend leveraging artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to enable [a] more preventative data-driven approach to service delivery, supporting citizens to stay well for longer,” she said. For the fourth theme, “Innovating Person-centred Care”, the first recommendation shared was to “apply a holistic socio-technical approach to precision and personalised medicine, driven by artificial intelligence and drug discovery.” Dr. Justinia added: “We also recommend introducing legislative frameworks using appropriate national mechanisms to regulate data usage and to protect creative patient privacy.” “Global Health Issues: The Big Picture” formed the fifth and final theme of HIMSS22 in Riyadh, with the first recommendation being the development of a “standard framework to collect social determinants of health for the Middle East population, to support health equity, clinical care, population health, and research.” Dr. Justinia concluded by saying: “We also recommend recruiting, training, and sustaining a digital health workforce and leadership through continuous, professional development, and rewarding career paths. We truly hope that all of these recommendations come to fruition in the Middle East.” CLOSING REMARKS In his closing remarks, Prof. Amr Jamal, consultant, family physician and clinical informatician, plus chairman of the Family and Community Medicine Department at King Saud University, paid tribute to the HIMSS22 Middle East scientific and organising committees that helped shape the conference and exhibition. Comprising the scientific committee are: Dr. Justinia, Dr. Ahmed Mohammed Balkhair of the Saudi Ministry of Health, Dr. Tamara Sunbul of John Hopkins Aramco Healthcare, Dr. Dari Alhuwail from the College of Life Sciences at Kuwait University, Dr. Osama El Hassan of the Dubai Health Authority, Eng Fahad Al-Hussein at Megamind IT Solutions, Mohammed Alhajjy at King Saud University Medical City, Dr. Rania Mohell at Ain Shams University, Dr. Mohammed Aldhoayan at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Prof. Mowafa Househ of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Lisa Thomlinson at HIMSS in the United Kingdom, Dr. Nasser Aljehani at the Council of Health Insurance, Sara Mohammed Aloudah of the Saudi Health Council, Dr. Hassan Ghazal at the National Center for Scientific and Technological Research, Dr. Najeeb Al-Shorbaji of the Middle East and North Africa Association of Health Informatics, and of course, Prof. Jamal. Making up the organising committee are: Waleed Albahli, Faiz AlRasheedi, Ahood Alshahrani, and Areej Al-Shehri of the National Health Information Center, plus the Saudi Health Council’s Aloudah, Prof. Jamal, and Dr. Balkhair. The 2022 HIMSS Middle East Health Conference & Exhibition was held under the patronage of His Excellency Eng. Fahad Al-Jalajel, Minister of Health of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in joint collaboration with the Ministry of Health, the Saudi Health Council, the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties, and the National Health Information Center.

COVID-19 transmission can be more accurately modeled by incorporating meteorological factors, with ultraviolet (UV) radiation as the main driver, according to a new study. COVID-19 transmission can be more accurately modeled by incorporating meteorological factors, with ultraviolet (UV) radiation as the main driver, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by a team of scientists from the Qatar Environment & Energy Research Institute (QEERI), at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Transvalor S.A., France. A growing number of studies suggest that climate may impact the spread of COVID-19 but the extent to which it modifies COVID-19 risk and transmission is not well understood. Studies on the impact of climate have been piecemeal or poorly controlled -- limited to single countries, only taking into account a few climatic parameters, or ignoring socioeconomics, for instance. In the new paper, the researchers studied data on reported COVID-19 cases in 196 countries over a 14-month period, using socioeconomic, environmental, and global health factors as control variables. They developed three different analytic approaches -- statistical, machine learning and econometric -- which modeled the potential contributions of climate to confirmed case numbers. The results suggest that while disease susceptibility, lockdown compliance, and increased testing are the most effective strategies for preventing the spread of COVID-19, UV radiation is the climate factor most strongly correlated with the spread of COVID-19, with greater UV radiation associated with reduced transmission. For other meteorological and air quality factors, including temperature, absolute humidity and solar radiation, discrepancies between results in the three analysis methods emphasized the difficulty in understanding the correlations. For instance, humidity was positively correlated with COVID-19 spread in the machine learning analysis and negatively correlated in the econometric analysis. Temperature was moderately negatively associated with COVID-19 in the statistical analysis but positively correlated with COVID-19 transmission in both the machine learning and econometric analyses. The authors conclude that UV radiation emerges as the most impactful meteorological factor in COVID-19 transmission across all methods. This could help refine transmission predictions based on seasonality or weather forecasts, and help inform future pandemic response measures that limit the economic impact of complete lockdowns. They point out that this is supported by overwhelming evidence that UV light can effectively kill SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses. The authors add: "The impact of climate on COVID-19 transmission rates has been the subject of many studies, but it is still poorly understood. In our study we demonstrated that meteorological factors play a key role in statistical, machine learning and econometric analyses of COVID-19 risk, with ultraviolet radiation (UV) as the main driver."

European genetic studies aren’t particularly accurate when applied to Middle East populations, according to new research from the Qatar Foundation. The first large whole genome sequencing study of the Qatari population, published in Nature Communications, is the first study to identify genetic variations that are specific to the Qatari population. It also provides new insights into the genetic architecture of clinical laboratory tests. “In this study, we found that genetic variations that control many lab tests (mainly related to blood cells) that were identified from studies of European populations have lower predictive performance when applied to the Qatari populations (i.e., they don’t translate well to Qatar),” Omar Albagha, Ph.D., joint senior author of the paper and professor of genomic and precision medicine at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Health and Life Sciences, told BioSpace. That said, the study noted that trait heritability is more similar between Qatari and European populations than between Qatari and African or Japanese populations. The research, Albagha said, “focused on blood lab tests, which are routinely used to assess patients and follow their treatments, because we know that genetic factors contribute to lab test measurements. “Therefore, to develop precision medicine, we need more studies to identify the collection of genetic variations that best predict diseases in the Middle Eastern populations. We cannot simply take the findings from European populations and directly apply them to the Middle East, because the genetic architecture of diseases varies with populations,” he said. This research assessed the genetic variants across the whole genome across 6,128 individuals and was confirmed against a screening of samples from 7,768 individuals from the Qatar Biobank. “The study was based mainly on Qataris and long-term residents from the Middle East,” he added. By exploring the data from 45 clinically relevant traits, Albagha and colleagues identified “281 distinct variant-trait-associations at genome-wide significance that replicate known associations,” the paper noted. Of those, 17 were found predominantly in Qataris. Notable heritability differences included height, body mass, cholesterol, red blood count and white blood count, among others. When the predictive performance of polygenic scores (PGS) from 11 traits was tested on data from the Qatar Genome Project (QGP), “all tested PGS showed lower performance when applied to QGP data, with an average performance of 64.7% of that when applied to Europeans,” the paper noted. The predictive differences may result from environmental or lifestyle factors, the study suggested, citing cholesterol as an example. The estimates for TCH and LDL-C are significantly lower than values reported in European or African populations, “suggesting a higher contribution of environmental influences, such as diet and lifestyle.” Body mass index heritability estimates were also lower, the authors wrote, noting that obesity in Qatar is among the highest in the world. Linkage disequilibrium patterns among populations appear to play a role in the predictive differences. Analysis showed “marked differences in linkage disequilibrium and allele frequencies among the European, East Asian, and Qatari populations.” The results of this study may be applied to the entire Middle East. “The results apply to individuals who share common family roots that may go back a few hundred years or more – so they certainly apply to people living in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region, and probably also to most of the Arab populations in the Middle East,” Karsten Suhre, Ph.D., joint senior author on the paper and director of bioinformatics core at Weill Cornell Medicine – Qatar, told BioSpace. “Further studies from other Arab populations are needed to obtain a more detailed picture.” “To the best of our knowledge, there is no published study describing genomic data of a similar size from the Middle East,” Albagha said. “Most published studies are based on a small size and are focused on a few lab tests of a single disease.” Suhre added, “The next largest study we know of also was conducted by us, with 996 participants from Qatar.” It used more general biochemical readouts rather than clinically relevant traits. “The findings of this study have been deposited in a publicly accessible database for researchers around the world. When our findings are combined with those from other populations, it is possible to identify additional genetic variations – especially if these variations are rare in other populations, such as Europeans, but common in Qataris,” Albagha said. In light of these findings, it is important to consider the specifics of the Arab genome as new therapies are developed. “These new variations could be useful targets for designing new treatments,” he said.