AI can ease pressure on ‘overwhelmed’ global healthcare systems, Mubadala executive says

Artificial intelligence will be used increasingly to relieve pressure on “overwhelmed” public healthcare systems around the world, a leading Mubadala executive has said.

Mina Hamoodi, head of healthcare at the Abu Dhabi investment company, said the technology would not, however, replace doctors, and would be adopted gradually to “help optimise” health care.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ms Hamoodi told The National that AI was “a big focus” for Mubadala, which was investing in innovative healthcare companies that make use of emerging technology.

Investors including Mubadala could put capital into businesses that “help advance health care and deal with some of the challenges” facing the sector, she said.

“Because there are challenges,” she added. “I think the public healthcare system globally is overwhelmed. There’s rising demand for healthcare services. We have generally an ageing population, rising incidence of chronic diseases.

“So there’s definitely a role, an important role, that AI and technology can play in alleviating some of the challenges.”

There has been increasing research into the use of AI to diagnose diseases by analysing scans, because the technology can be trained rapidly on thousands of images.

Ms Hamoodi predicted that there would be a “gradual integration” of the technology into health care and it would “augment and help optimise” the sector.

“I don’t see that extreme case of suddenly moving towards AI-powered doctors … I think in health care it'll be probably a slow and steady progression of how we adopt AI and technology. It needs to be thoughtfully done,” she said.

Ms Hamoodi noted that technology, such as telemedicine consultations, that once seemed “foreign” in the UAE was increasingly accepted. She praised the country’s health officials for having a forward-looking attitude to tech.

Among Mubadala’s AI-related healthcare investments has been the purchase of a nearly €270 million ($336 million) stake in Evotec, which uses AI in drug development.

AI can also be used in healthcare IT to cut waste in countries including in the US, where Ms Hamoodi said an estimated $1 trillion a year – out of $4.9 trillion in annual healthcare spending – was lost because of “administrative complexity” and “pricing failures”.

Last year, Mubadala invested in Zelis, which Ms Hamoodi said provided an AI-powered “digital platform that connects payers, providers and patients to make payments much more seamless”.

“One of the more frustrating aspects for patients in the US is navigating the financial journey of health care," she added. "So that’s one example of a business that’s tech-enabled that’s helping to address some of these challenges and contain healthcare costs.

“I think we've all heard of the sort of tug of war that you do have in the US between insurers and hospitals and patients. And what a pain point that can be. So this is obviously a business of the future that you’re looking ahead to.”

The US and Europe were the initial focus of Mubadala’s international healthcare investments, but there has since been a shift towards Asia. The fund has also been looking for rapidly growing healthcare sectors in which it has not previously made heavy investments, with capital used in “outsourced pharma services”.

“We invested in businesses across that entire pharma drug-development value chain. And really the premise was, how can we get exposure to the high-growth world of pharma and biotech without taking the binary risk of just one or two products?”

Mubadala has been “riding the wave of innovation” and helping companies to bring products to market at a time when new forms of drugs have emerged, including biologics, made from living organisms.

Early last year it was among three funds that bought a minority stake in Manipal Health Enterprises, described as India’s second-largest hospital chain.

Mubadala has also invested in the Chinese healthcare market for more than a decade. A current interest is the operation of multinational pharmaceutical companies that are choosing to focus on their core markets.

“We see an opportunity to buy those portfolios and create a dedicated China platform or pan-Asia platform and we’ve made a couple of deals in that space with a partner called CBC Group,” Ms Hamoodi added.

Ms Hamoodi, who joined Mubadala’s healthcare arm in 2012, is currently involved in global healthcare projects, but was initially part of a division that focused on investments within the UAE.

She said the UAE had spent a “significant amount of money” sending Emirati patients abroad for treatment, so authorities in the country have made efforts to plug gaps in healthcare access and quality. That includes setting up Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, which opened in 2015, and the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre in the capital.

“The first part of our journey within Mubadala is really investing in, upgrading and enhancing the UAE healthcare system,” she said.

For Cleveland Clinic, she said “there were lots of trips back and forth between Abu Dhabi and Cleveland” to understand the US model of care, how that could be imported to Abu Dhabi, and how it could offer speciality care not previously available in the UAE.

The hospital, where Ms Hamoodi is a board member, reached a milestone in 2023 with the opening of the Fatima bint Mubarak Centre, which is named after the Mother of the Nation and specialises in cancer care. Last month Jill Biden, US first lady at the time, visited the centre.

Ms Hamoodi said it was now possible for complex cases that previously required overseas care to be treated in the UAE. Many doctors at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi trained in the US before moving to the UAE.

“That's one that we're very proud of, because of the transformational impact it’s had, not just to the UAE, but the wider region,” Ms Hamoodi said. "It’s truly the same calibre and quality of care that you would get in Cleveland."