Artificial intelligence reshapes clinical practice as physician assistant joins Malaffi

The Department of Health – Abu Dhabi has integrated an AI powered tool into the emirate's Health Information Exchange, enabling doctors to access patient records and medical summaries with unprecedented speed, freeing time for what matters most: direct patient care.

The texture of modern medicine is changing. In consulting rooms and clinics across Abu Dhabi, physicians now have access to something that would have seemed like science fiction only years ago: an artificial intelligence assistant that understands medical records, synthesises patient histories and responds to clinical questions with the precision of a seasoned colleague.

The Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, working alongside M42’s Abu Dhabi Health Data Services, has woven this AI powered physician assistant into Malaffi, Abu Dhabi’s Health Information Exchange. The tool is now available to every physician practising in the emirate, fundamentally changing how doctors engage with the wealth of clinical information at their fingertips.

What makes this integration particularly significant is its scale and ambition. Malaffi’s database holds health information for more than 14 million patients, encompassing more than four billion clinical records. These encompass everything a physician might need: clinical documents, allergy histories, laboratory results, vital signs, radiology images and diagnostic test findings. Before, accessing this information meant time spent searching, clicking through systems, mentally piecing together a patient’s story. Now, the assistant retrieves what matters, distils it into coherent summaries and answers specific clinical questions.

The technology draws on Ossi, M42’s AI Clinical Platform, which runs on Microsoft Azure’s cloud infrastructure hosted within the United Arab Emirates. This matters, because it means the system operates within the emirate’s own secure digital environment, subject to all approved access permissions and patient data protection requirements that govern healthcare in Abu Dhabi.

Yet the innovation remains, fundamentally, in service of the physician’s judgment. The system retrieves and summarises; the doctor decides. Clinical assessment and medical decisions remain unambiguously the responsibility of physicians themselves. This distinction is deliberate and important. The assistant is a tool that amplifies human expertise, not one that replaces it. As we reported in our earlier coverage of Abu Dhabi’s commitment to advancing healthcare innovation, the emirate has consistently prioritised human centred approaches to medical technology.

Dimitris Moulavasilis, Group Chief Executive of M42, described Ossi as having been developed specifically around the needs of physicians in everyday clinical practice. By integrating it into Malaffi’s connected health data ecosystem, M42 brings these capabilities directly into physicians’ daily workflows, allowing them to access and review relevant medical information far more efficiently than before.

Kareem Shahin, Chief Executive of Abu Dhabi Health Data Services, emphasised that Malaffi has already proven its value in connecting health information across Abu Dhabi’s healthcare providers. The new assistant represents another practical tool to help physicians make better use of this connected data in their work. The implementation will be continuously evaluated, with feedback from physicians used to refine the assistant’s functions and improve its performance as it evolves.

What it means for Abu Dhabi

This development represents a significant step in Abu Dhabi’s broader digital health transformation. By reducing the administrative burden on physicians – the time spent searching for information rather than attending to patients – the system potentially frees hundreds of thousands of clinical hours for what matters most: direct, thoughtful patient care. The emirate’s ambition has always been to use connected medical data and technological innovation not for their own sake, but to respond meaningfully to patients’ needs.

More broadly, the integration signals Abu Dhabi’s commitment to developing a digital health ecosystem where technology serves physicians and patients alike, where innovation is grounded in the practical realities of clinical work, and where human judgment remains central. As the system is refined through physician feedback and usage data, it will almost certainly influence how healthcare systems across the region think about integrating artificial intelligence into medical practice.

Source: WAM

On Simply Luxury: Microsoft