With its modern healthcare infrastructure and ambitious digital transformation agenda, the UAE is well positioned to build an AI-ready healthcare ecosystem. Samir Akel, Regional Vice President, Emerging Markets at Nintex, explains why workflow orchestration and governance will be critical to scaling AI and improving patient care.
Most healthcare systems trying to adopt AI are fighting decades of legacy infrastructure just to get started. The UAE isn’t in that position, and in fact, this is one of the few healthcare markets in the world building its AI-native future on relatively new foundations, with national ambition and investment to match.
Tellingly, the numbers reflect that. The UAE’s digital health market is projected to grow from around $945 million in 2025 to roughly $7.8 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate above 23%. That growth runs alongside mandatory national health insurance, giving providers both the investment and the policy mandate to build digital-first, connected processes at national scale.
This is a strong advantage, and the next question is how to accelerate the push towards a fully digitalised healthcare system.
Patient care shouldn’t be stalled inside a workflow
Behind every referral, pre-authorisation and vendor contract sits a process, and in healthcare, a slow or broken one has a direct human cost. A referral stuck in an inbox is a patient waiting longer than they should. A claim re-entered manually across three systems is a delay in a provider getting paid and a patient getting billed correctly. And a new supplier or clinician still being onboarded through scattered emails and shared folders is time a hospital administrator isn’t spending on patients.
None of this is unique to the UAE, it’s the same pattern behind slow claims processing and manual vendor onboarding that healthcare organisations everywhere are working to fix. But with national medical insurance mandates pushing claims volumes higher across every provider, the UAE has both the pressure and the opportunity to design this well from the outset, rather than having to retrofit it to more fragmented systems years later.
The opportunity is orchestration, not just intelligence
AI is very good at specific things: reading a document, flagging an anomaly, summarising a patient history, suggesting a next step. What it isn’t, on its own, is an operating model. A recommendation only becomes useful to patient care when it moves reliably through referral, authorisation, scheduling and billing, across departments, systems and sometimes multiple facilities within the same group.
That’s where orchestration comes in, and it’s where the UAE has the chance to build the governed, deterministic layer around AI from the outset.
Deterministic workflows, the same input reliably producing the same output, are what make that possible. When a referral, a pre-authorisation or an escalation is routed through an orchestrated, auditable process, every step is traceable: what happened, why and who approved it. That reliability is what lets AI be trusted with more responsibility over time, and what frees clinical and administrative staff to spend less time on paperwork and more on the patient in front of them.
Governance as an accelerant
Healthcare is understandably one of the most tightly governed sectors in the UAE, and that’s a strength here rather than friction. A clear regulatory environment gives providers a reason to build orchestration and governance into processes from day one, rather than bolting it on after an AI pilot runs into an audit requirement it was never designed for, and it keeps sensitive patient data protected.
The providers moving fastest aren’t the ones deploying AI in isolated pilots. They’re the ones building the orchestration layer, the workflows, escalation paths and audit trails, so that as AI capability grows, it’s operating inside a system built to be trusted with it.
A model worth building carefully
Since so much of the region’s health infrastructure is being built new, the UAE has a significant opportunity to build AI-ready healthcare with orchestration and governance designed in from the start. Providers here aren’t just adopting AI, they’re in a position to get ahead of a problem the rest of the world’s healthcare systems are still working through.
