Dubai: KEF Holdings, a Dubai-based conglomerate, has announced the setting up of the first Quaternary care Heart and Orthopaedics Centre in Dubai. This centre, due to open in October 2021, will link five countries — UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq and Qatar — bringing efficient, worldclass and affordable health care to all.
The Centre for Excellence for cardiac and orthopaedic care will have its headquarters at the Canadian Specialty Hospital, Dubai, and will cater to patients looking for cardiac and orthopaedic care from all these countries.
The announcement was made virtually at Arab Health, titled ‘Future Proofing health care — the challenges and the opportunities’.
Presenting the unique hub-and-spoke model for Quaternary Health Care at a webinar, on the sidelines of Arab Health 2021, Faizal Kottikollon, the founder and chairman of KEF Holdings, said: “The health-care industry has been under increasing strain across the value-chain, as the recent pandemic has illustrated. We need to strengthen our health-care systems right from infrastructure readiness, talent availability to financial stability and build a health-care ecosystem that will be preventative in nature. At present, the patient is outside this eco-system and with Meitra Care Network, in collaboration with MGM Health Care in India and Canadian Specialty Hospital, Dubai, we aim to bring the patient at the centre of this system, making worldclass health care affordable.”
How the system will work?
Kottikollon explained: “The way this will work is with the coining of a new term: ‘Phygital’. This refers to the physical and digital consultation. For instance, if a person in Iraq requires cardiac consultation, he will be able to contact the local care centre set up by KEF Holding in his or her country and get a detailed consultation digitally with a cardiac specialist in Dubai. The patient can reach the centre in his country and get all vital parameters checked via tele-health, digitally, which will be recorded in real time with the centre here in UAE. The doctor can then prescribe treatment to the patient if this can be handled remotely.”
He continued: “However, if the patient is assessed to require personal consultation, he or she will be flown in here, operated, physically rehabilitated at the hub, to be stationed at the Centre of Excellence at the Canadian Specialty Hospital. This kind of facility will be available in all the countries under this hub-and-spoke and home model.”
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Making health care accessible regionally
“We want to optimise the availability of specialist facilities, advance cardiac and orthopaedic care and rehabilitation, so that we reach out to the needy patients in the region,” explained Kottikollon, who already has a successful model working at Meitra Hospital, Kozhikode, Kerala, India.
