The health care systems of GCC countries are struggling to keep pace with the local economic, demographic, and epidemiological transitions taking place.

Various factors — including urbanisation and a rise in health risk factors such as smoking, low physical activity, and obesity — have resulted in high rates of morbidity and mortality caused by chronic diseases.

To address these issues, GCC governments have defined health care as one of the key focus areas for the coming years. And immense investments are being made to build and upgrade hospitals and clinics, roll out mandatory health insurance schemes, and encourage private sector investments in health care.

Saudi Arabia, for example, aims to increase the private sector contribution to health care spending to 35 per cent by the year 2020 (from an estimated baseline level of 25 per cent in 2015, as outlined by the Saudi National Transformation Program 2020).

GCC countries have a unique opportunity to address their health care challenges and build gold-standard innovative systems for health care administration and delivery by absorbing and putting into practice the best available resources and technologies. Indeed, GCC states have already made plans to do so.

Innovation and excellence is a major theme of the health care development strategies of GCC member states. And the UAE is at the forefront of such developments, with the UAE National Agenda (under the UAE Vision 2021) aiming to create “a world-class health care system.”

In the realisation of these ambitious health care goals, health care industries across the GCC states are expected to post double-digit annual growth rates over the coming years. And in the context of the growing local health needs and the prevailing medical focus on chronic diseases, GCC health care systems are also expected to undergo a major transformation going forward.

In order to develop state-of-the-art, patient-centred health care delivery systems that match the best global standards and rank among the best in the world, GCC states will continue investing in and experimenting with their health care models in the years to come.

Inevitably, technology transformation will remain at the heart of the health care developments being undertaken in the GCC, as it is a key enabler for the achievement of the ambitious goals and visions for top-class health care. In fact, ICT has been explicitly recognised as a major factor that will support the achievement of various health care objectives, both in the short and long term.

For example, one of the 15 strategic objectives set for the Saudi Ministry of Health under the Saudi National Transformation Program 2020 is to “improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care sector through the use of IT and digital transformation.” The program has allocated SAR5.9 billion from government sources for “electronic health” initiatives over the next five years.

ICT will be crucial in supporting the transformation of GCC health care systems and achieving nearly all of the region-wide strategic health care objectives, including those related to building workforce capacity, fighting lifestyle-related diseases, and improving access to health care services.

IoT, in particular, will be one of the key technologies to play a central role in this transformation. IoT-enabled solutions will support health care objectives such as improving timely access to medical care, ensuring patient safety, and assuring the quality and efficiency of medical care at all levels in the GCC region.

Coupled with mobile and analytic technologies, IoT will play an unparalleled role in driving the digital transformation of GCC health care systems, accelerating innovation and supporting the push toward gold-standard health care delivery models.

In fact, the current epidemiological trends and systemic gaps in GCC health care markets provide good reasons for trying IoT in virtually any area of health care delivery and administration, from point-of-care to environmental monitoring, inventory management, and cost optimisation.

Data is perhaps the most precious asset in the health care field, and IoT marks a new era of data generation in health care. IoT-enabled systems today provide unprecedented opportunities for collecting data about nearly everything: doctors, patients, medical equipment, lab specimens, and medicines.

Connected sensor-based systems enable the tracking of anything from a patient’s blood pressure to a doctor’s hand-washing patterns — even laundry turnover in the basement of a hospital. However, there is little value in data unless it is analysed, interpreted, and used meaningfully.

Therefore, the utility of the IoT-enabled systems largely depends on the quality of analytic and decision-support systems and their ability to derive value from the data. And in the future, cognitive technologies will play an immense role in translating the data collected from connected biosensors into actionable information.

The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC