Saudi Arabia has long represented an alluring marketplace for the global MedTech industry. Not only does the Kingdom constitute the largest spender on healthcare across the Middle East and North Africa region, but its medical device sector has been experiencing consistent compound annual growth rates of over six percent and is anticipated to exceed a value of USD 2.3 billion before the end of 2025. However, this growing appeal extends well beyond the prospect of surging sales figures.
“There’s no doubt that this market has become a very strategic piece in Zimmer Biomet’s growth trajectory, and it’s not only about the numbers,” confides the American company’s general manager, Amr Kenawi. “It has just as much to do with the manner in which this ambitious nation is going about overhauling and transforming its healthcare system.”
Indeed, as part of its Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s government is striving to reimagine public health provision and design, an ideal healthcare model that is future-fit and leverages the best of technological innovation. “While the Kingdom’s population size might not rival those of some other rapidly developing markets, Saudi Arabia can nonetheless serve as a fantastic blueprint for healthcare reinvention, as well as a testing ground for next-generation medical technologies and digitally-enabled services within an emerging market setting,” explains Kenawi.
“What makes Saudi Arabia such a fascinating prospect from a MedTech perspective is the country’s desire to position itself as the new frontier for experimenting with state-of-the-art devices and techniques,” agrees Majid Al Fayyadh, CEO of King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSHRC).
This means unparalleled opportunities to demonstrate proof of concept, as well as potentially lucrative deals for those able and willing to get involved. “The intersection of AI-driven biotech and robotics alone is projected to generate between up to USD 27 billion for Saudi Arabia’s medical sector before the end of the decade,” observes Al Fayyadh.
The Kingdom is already conspicuous as an enthusiastic host to the early adoption and deployment of many of medical science’s most promising technological inventions. Japanese medical device developer, Terumo, for instance is now routinely utilising a breakthrough ‘quantitative flow ratio’ digital imaging solution that allows Saudi physicians to assess coronary blood flow without requiring traditional catheter-based fractional flow reserve measurements. “By eliminating the need for physical intervention, this innovation radically transforms patient outcomes by providing faster, more precise diagnostics at significantly reduced procedural complexity,” explains country manager, Elias El Zoughbi.
Siemens Healthineers, meanwhile, has been pioneering novel artificial intelligence-powered solutions in radiation therapy that unlock significant advancements in treatment accuracy. “By harnessing machine learning, we are proving able to deliver a level of meticulous planning that minimises harm to adjacent tissues in complex cases, resulting in considerably improved patient prospects,” confirms Björn Bodenstein, managing director of the German multinational’s Saudi affiliate.
It is perhaps in the field of organ transplants, though, that some of the most eye-catching examples of novel technology advancement have been in evidence. “At KFSHRC, we are currently leading the way in robotic-assisted transplants and cardiac surgeries,” says Majid Al Fayyadh, pointing out that his centre performed the world’s first fully robotic living donor liver transplant in 2023, as well as the first fully robotic heart transplant last September.
Already, such developments are starting to redraw the risk and recovery paradigm. For instance, in January 2025, his team performed the first-ever robotic-assisted implantation of an artificial heart pump on a 35-year-old patient. The results were remarkable: the patient spent only four days in intensive care, compared to the standard 26-day stay commonly adopted for conventional open-heart surgeries.
“Though countries such as China and South Korea might perform far greater volumes of transplants, our objective is to compete not in terms of quantity, but game-changing innovation. We seek to position Saudi Arabia as a central protagonist in shaping the very future of medicine by demonstrating that robotic surgery should become a default approach, reserving open surgery only for the most complex of cases,” declares Al Fayyadh.
Digital-First Healthcare
What makes Saudi Arabia’s application of digital innovation in the medical technology space especially interesting, however, is the ongoing attempts to extend beyond point solutions and cultivate a digitally enabled and fully connected healthcare system. “At the centrepiece of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 transformation lies the bold ambition to create an integrated and frictionless healthcare journey,” affirms Mohammed Saleh, health director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Microsoft.
“Historically, healthcare systems have operated in silos, requiring patients to navigate multiple disconnected platforms for appointments, insurance claims, and treatment coordination. Saudi Arabia has been systematically addressing this through a variety of unified digital platforms including SEHHATY, a national health application, MAWID, a centralised appointment system, and the National Platform for Health and Insurance Exchange Services (NPHIES), which acts as a comprehensive health information exchange system,” he observes.
The successful roll out of SEHHATY has been a milestone in enabling healthcare providers to capture patient visit data and feed it into a centralised system. This ensures that patient health records are unified and accessible nationwide – rationalising treatment pathways, reducing the duplication of services, and informing better decision-making.
“The broader objective is ultimately to leverage big data and advanced digital tools to design a fully integrated patient experience, whereby patients transition effortlessly between different healthcare touchpoints, improving operational efficiency, engagement, and outcomes,” details Saleh.
Already there are numerous examples of this in action. Alcon, a Swiss-American medical device outfit specialising in eye-care has introduced a pre-operative biometer that offers end-to-end connectivity. “Once the biometer is used in the clinic, the data is transmitted to another system. This allows the diagnostic information, including lens readings, to flow directly into the operating room so surgeons can use the real time insights to provide patient-specific treatment, enhancing the precision of the procedure,” recounts the company’s senior director for surgical franchise and cluster manager for MEA, Fadi AlSafadi.
Meanwhile, Terumo has been redefining how its in-country interventional procedures are planned and executed through the introduction of Showpad, a cloud-based digital platform. “Essentially what this innovation does is provide physicians with instant access to product specifications, procedural guidelines, alongside real-time patient data,” reveals El Zoughbi. “As it is fully interoperable across hospital systems, it offers seamless integration across the medical infrastructure, enabling healthcare professionals to analyse patient history, procedural insights, and critical case data at a single glance.”
Medtronic, too, has been at the forefront of harnessing the power of big data. “Many of our in-Kingdom therapies are in fact implantable microcomputers that collect extensive physiological data. Today, this information is no longer simply stored; it is being mined in real time, in close collaboration with healthcare professionals to adjust therapies on the fly, personalize care, and improve patient outcomes,” details the company’s VP for the Middle East, Khalil Jamaleddine.
It of course helps that many of the foundational elements for digital transformation are already engrained within the country’s institutional and social fabric. “The genius of Saudi policymakers has actually been to adopt a stepwise, layered approach: first establishing the infrastructural backbone, then shifting the focus to data standards and information flow,” surmises Vineta Bhalla, partner and chief medical officer for the Middle East at Deloitte.
This has encompassed building national health data centres, consolidating patient information across public and private spheres, and implementing strict data privacy and security frameworks, which the Ministry of Interior’s National Data Centre and ELM, a semi-governmental data integration entity, have performed vital roles in facilitating.
Close-knit public-private collaboration has been an important feature of this ongoing process. “We are continuing to make big-ticket investments into local data infrastructure to support Saudi Arabia’s data localization requirements,” reveals Medtronic’s Jamaleddine. “In partnership with the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, we are establishing a dedicated local data centre complete with secure storage and processing functionalities which shall empower clinicians to monitor patient progress at any time and intervene proactively.”
“Contemporary Saudi Arabia certainly demonstrates exceptional capabilities in data collection and infrastructure, as well as increasingly specialised and independent regulatory agencies whose separation allows for a more dynamic policy environment that can properly accommodate new technological advancements,” concurs Amgen’s general manager, Lyes Salah.
Frictionless Patient Pathways
One of the most profound expressions of Saudi Arabia’s digitalisation of its healthcare apparatus has been the mainstreaming of telemedicine and the advent of virtual hospitals. Designed with a view to leveraging digital connectivity to overcome bottlenecks such as limited accessibility to specialised care, SEHA Virtual Hospital, the world’s largest such network, brings together 170 hospitals and over 600 primary healthcare centres, delivering critical care spanning virtual-ICU, virtual cardiology, virtual stroke, virtual-EEG and tele radiology, among others.
“Our overriding objective is to enhance healthcare access, ensuring timely interventions regardless of geographical or temporal constraints. What sets us apart from traditional hospitals is that we lack a physical space for patient admissions; instead, our providers operate from dedicated facilities equipped with remote technologies,” explains Mona Sahman Al-Subaie, CEO of the SEHA Virtual Hospital & Innovation Enablement Centre.
“It’s a frankly ground-breaking initiative, which eliminates the need for skilled practitioner presence by enabling remote scanning thus solving longstanding accessibility challenges particularly in the Kingdom’s rural regions where healthcare facilities have tended to lack advanced equipment and specialised expertise,” reports Siemens Healthineers’ Björn Bodenstein whose company has been providing some of the supporting technologies. “Our Syngo Virtual Cockpit solution is being deployed by SEHA to connect experienced specialists in Riyadh with hospitals in underserved areas, ensuring patients no longer need to travel extensive distances for care.”
Medtronic, concurrently, is investing over USD 1 million in advanced remote-support technologies so as to enable experts in Riyadh to guide procedures being performed in remote hospitals. “Given the Kingdom’s vast geography, deploying personnel to every site is not scalable. To overcome this, this approach ensures that patients benefit from expert input regardless of location,” explains Khalil Jamaleddin.
Moreover, digital transformation on a nationwide scale is not only setting in motion massive operational efficiencies, but also making for a genuinely patient-centric approach to treatment pathways. “Personalised healthcare is fast emerging as the dominant paradigm of the next era of public health, fuelled by rapid advancements in genomics, AI, digital connectivity and big data analytics. We can expect that tomorrow’s patients will be much more empowered to take control of their health, and that medical interventions shall be increasingly tailored to individual needs. And Saudi Arabia is positioning itself at the forefront of these trends,” opines Rami Rajab, CEO of MECOMED, the country’s medical device association.
Indeed, SEHA has been combining telemedicine, platforms like SEHHATY and digitally enabled healthtech such as wearable devices to generate personalised health insights in real time that can be simultaneously shared with both patient and medical practitioner. “One of our novel functions has been to analyse this data and engage with patients to provide tailored coaching and guidance. Should we detect any indicators or risks, we immediately direct them towards appropriate pathways, ensuring timely responsiveness,” recounts Al-Subaie.
Meanwhile medtech developers such as Zimmer Biomet have been busy rolling out their own solutions, prioritising enhancement of the patient experience. “We plan to launch an application which supports patients the entire journey. It is already present in the United States, and Saudi Arabia will be among the first countries when we introduce it this year, reveals Amr Kenawi.
Rationalised Financing
Blanket digitalisation is, at the same time, heralding a revolution in outcome-based financing. “By capturing healthcare information digitally, standardising how it is used, and aligning payment systems with patient outcomes, Saudi Arabia is steadily transitioning towards a more cost-effective model of care in which volume-driven, fee-for-service models are eschewed in favour of rewarding positive healthcare outcomes that align with patient needs,” reflects MECOMED’s Rami Rajab.
Assisting the Kingdom with this process is Solventum, formerly 3M’s healthcare business. “The first step towards a rationalised financing of healthcare involves re-digitization and the implementation of a unified language of health, so that every hospital and clinic speak the same standard when documenting care,” explains Mohamed Al Holibi, the company’s regional business lead for health information systems.
While merely a few years ago, in-country care providers and insurers ran their own pricing systems, regulatory bodies such as the Saudi Health Council (SHC) have been making considerable headway in enforcing a more standardised approach. Concurrently, Solventum has been assisting its clients to introduce Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRG) systems which categorise patients into defined groups, and to translate clinical documentation into codes that reflect what happened to the patient during their hospital stay, thus allowing providers to use them in payment schemes and quality metrics.
“Through DRG’s the country is striving for a bundled payment approach, which means that a hospital or provider is reimbursed for each patient’s case rather than for individual services, shifting the focus from volume to evaluating their comparative end impact,” recounts Al Holibi.
He stresses, however, that Saudi Arabia is currently only part way along this journey. “The type of genuine value-based care that the Kingdom’s visionary policymakers are ultimately aspiring to transcends the DRG payment system, which applies largely only to inpatient settings. Next shall be to consider and incorporate outpatient services, as well as settings such as home care,” he insists.
What is for certain, though, is that the country’s methodical and all-inclusive digitalisation of the healthcare domain is unleashing unprecedented opportunities to use financial incentives to encourage better outcomes at lower costs. “Already we are finding ourselves able to track complications during patient care, pre-admission processes, emergency care, and in-patient admissions, and, by capturing data on these metrics, can flag wasteful practices within the payment system,” confirms Al Holibi.
Also hugely effective could be reducing hospital congestion and optimising patient flow, thanks to automated KPIs that extend beyond measuring patient volumes to evaluating no-show rates, unnecessary hospital visits, and readmission rates. “Deep data analysis is revealing that many hospital visits could be effectively managed at primary care clinics, leading us to envisage the introduction of a referral-based healthcare model,” explains Microsoft’s Mohammed Saleh.
Under this system, citizens would be assigned to dedicated primary care centres as their first point of medical contact, ensuring that only complex cases would be escalated to specialised hospitals. “This approach would potentially significantly enhance the efficiency of hospital resource allocation, while also carrying the added bonus of improving the continuity of care,” he claims.
GE Healthcare’s ‘Command Center’ concept provides a good illustration of operational optimization in action. “The Command Center functionality we have installed within the Kingdom serves as a powerful tool to healthcare institutions and the Ministry alike in monitoring KPIs and empowering stakeholders to course correct in real time with a view to reducing MRI wait times, increasing equipment utilization, and improving diagnostic accuracy,” explains Mohammad El Khoury, the company’s general manager for the Middle East.
New Rules
Saudi Arabia’s healthcare transformation is radically redrawing the rules of the game and forcing MedTech developers to reconsider how they interact with the market. For a start, those companies that are able, are diversifying their offering to cover as much of the healthcare continuum as possible.
“Conscious of the pressing demand for fully-integrated, joined-up healthcare, we are now offering a comprehensive solution covering the entire patient journey from vascular access to final closure,” recounts Terumo’s El Zoughbi. “This portfolio encompasses radio-embolization, embolization beads, and coils for liver cancer treatment, along with industry-leading access devices — critical tools without which some hospitals would be unable to perform certain procedures.”
Michio Kondo, managing director for the Middle East and Africa at Fujifilm concurs. “Following our 2021 acquisition of Hitachi’s imaging division, which expanded our product portfolio to encompass MRI, CT, and ultrasound equipment, we have been able to offer a broader range of solutions to our Saudi customers. Essentially, we have focused on shifting from a product-driven to a solution-driven approach and find this to be highly appreciated within the local market.”
And by integrating a wide range of harmonised services from imaging to digitalisation and screening, the company can offer a one-stop solution. “Our ability to interconnect these diverse fields alongside advances in medical IT allows us to take a considerably more holistic approach combining products, services, and collaboration with customers to create customised solutions,” says Kondo “Furthermore, Fujifilm has made sure to prioritise interoperability, meaning our IT solutions can integrate seamlessly with third-party equipment and data sharing initiatives, which is absolutely paramount in this fast evolving and increasing digitally connected landscape.”
“The expectation is nowadays to go beyond a traditional transactional model to more of a partnership-driven approach designed to deliver meaningful outcomes,” observes Siemens Healthineers’ Björn Bodenstein noting that his organization is currently collaborating with over 30 local key opinion leaders and institutions to address the Kingdom’s outstanding healthcare challenges.
GE Healthcare, at the same time, has diversified its offering to embrace a wider array of partners. “Our adaptability extends to tailoring our portfolio for diverse healthcare providers, ensuring that advanced Class A hospitals can access high-performance technologies while smaller facilities benefit from cost-effective solutions,” acknowledges Mohammad El Khoury.
The company has gone as far as to establish a dedicated education centre in Saudi Arabia, which not only trains local engineers but also hosts participants from abroad. “For advanced skill levels, engineers are sent out to GE HealthCare’s manufacturing facilities internationally to gain specialised expertise. This ensures our teams are equipped to maintain and repair complex medical technologies, contributing to the long-term sustainability of the country’s healthcare infrastructure,” he attests.
To make a success of this market clearly does require a certain amount of flexibility and adaption, but the opportunities and possibilities are endless. “In our industry, the Kingdom is rapidly cementing its status as the North Star of the region and that makes it a fascinating market to be active in,” concludes Terumo’s Elias El Zoughbi.
