Saudi Arabia is already living the future of healthcare

While traveling to Riyadh for the Fortune Global Forum, FII9, and the Global Health Exhibition, I witnessed something that should be a wake-up call for health systems everywhere. Saudi Arabia is already operating the kind of connected, AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure many countries are still debating how to build. At FII9, the conversation was unmistakable. Global innovation momentum is shifting toward the Middle East, and nowhere more than Saudi Arabia, where national digital platforms like Sehhaty already give millions of residents unified access to their health data. At the Global Health Exhibition, I saw population-level analytics, AI-powered diagnostics, multiomic initiatives, and interoperable infrastructure deployed at a speed and scale that would take years in other countries. It made something clear: Healthcare does not have a data problem. We have a connection problem.

LIFESTYLE DRIVES OUTCOMES, BUT REMAINS CLINICALLY INVISIBLE

Studies show that lifestyle and environmental factors account for more than 80% of health outcomes. A healthy lifestyle can prevent the vast majority of chronic diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. And yet, the data that reflects how people actually live, how they eat, move, sleep, and manage stress, remains largely absent from clinical care.

In the United States, for example, healthcare is not suffering from a data shortage. It’s drowning in data. Every day, people generate powerful information through wearables, continuous glucose monitors, fitness and sleep apps, and smart rings. As of 2023, nearly one in three Americans use a wearable to track their health, according to a Health Information National Trends Survey. These tools capture meaningful lifestyle signals that directly affect clinical outcomes. Yet almost none of this data reaches the exam room. It remains siloed on consumer platforms, invisible to clinicians, and unusable in medical decision making.

This disconnect has consequences. Preventive opportunities are missed. Chronic conditions go unmanaged. Healthcare remains reactive instead of proactive. Clinicians rely on structured snapshots like lab results and prescriptions, important, but incomplete, because they capture what happens in the clinic rather than daily life.

AI AS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN LIFESTYLE DATA AND CLINICAL CARE

It’s not that clinicians are uninterested in wearable data. Many are eager. Remote patient monitoring has grown rapidly, with a 1,300% increase in related procedures between 2019 and 2022. However, the friction points are real. Data security is a concern. Device accuracy varies. Practices often lack the IT infrastructure to onboard new tools, train staff, and integrate multiple data streams. Most importantly, clinicians are overwhelmed. More raw data is not the solution.

This is why healthcare systems need a bridge that makes lifestyle data usable, reliable, and safe in clinical settings. That bridge is clinical-grade AI. When lifestyle and longitudinal behavioral datasets are used at inference time via retrieval, AI’s outputs are grounded in real-world signals rather than abstract reasoning alone, distilling only the most relevant insights for the point of care. The goal is not another dashboard, but meaningful signals embedded within existing workflows that reduce burden rather than increase it. With the right tools, AI also empowers patients. Personalized, real-time guidance rooted in their own physiology helps them understand their data, make better decisions, and stay aligned with their care plan.

A NATIONAL DIGITAL HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE

Countries such as Saudi Arabia are demonstrating what happens when clinical and systems-level data come together. The unified national health platform Sehhaty serves as an access point for millions of residents and offers integrated services far beyond scheduling. These include secure medical records, online prescriptions, lab results, vaccination history, teleconsultations, and remote monitoring. The app reportedly contains 31 million unified health files, representing nearly 88% of the population, and 140 million online prescriptions.

At the center of this transformation is the Seha Virtual Hospital, which delivers remote specialist care across 224 hospitals and dozens of specialties, including critical-care consults and AI-driven diagnostics. Investments in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and advanced AI at institutions such as King Faisal Specialist Hospital rival those of some of the best programs in the United States. The result is a coordinated model of nationwide digital health integration, something long envisioned but not yet achieved.

TO BUILD THE FUTURE OF HEALTH, CONNECT THE DOTS

The United States has the devices and data, but has long lacked the infrastructure and incentives to connect them meaningfully. That is beginning to shift. Recent CMS initiatives signal recognition that prevention, lifestyle data, and technology-enabled care must play a larger role in how health outcomes are measured and reimbursed. Initiatives such as MAHA ELEVATE and the CMS ACCESS Model reflect a growing shift toward prevention-first, lifestyle-driven care. MAHA ELEVATE supports Medicare pilot programs that test whether whole-person, lifestyle-based care can improve health outcomes and lower costs, while ACCESS helps bring these approaches to scale through new care delivery and outcome-based payment models. In parallel, CMS Aligned Networks is focusing on improving interoperability and coordination across the healthcare ecosystem, creating standards and incentives that allow data to move safely between patients, providers, and care teams. The opportunity is to ensure that lifestyle data are treated as essential clinical information and that AI translates complexity into actionable insight at the point of care.

The most valuable health data we possess is already being captured on our wrists, in our pockets, and throughout our daily routines. The challenge is no longer collection. It’s connection. To close the gap, we must treat lifestyle data as essential clinical information and not a consumer novelty. Interoperable systems must allow this information to move securely to the right stakeholders, with AI surfacing timely, relevant signals that support decision making without adding friction for clinicians or patients.

Only then can healthcare move from fragmented snapshots to continuous understanding, from episodic and reactive care to a model that anticipates risk, promotes healthy behaviors, and supports the whole person. The future of healthcare is already taking shape in places such as Riyadh, where vision, infrastructure, and execution are aligned. Other countries, including the United States, can get there too, but only if we connect the dots.

Noosheen Hashemi is founder and CEO of January AI.

View the full article