Abu Dhabi's M42 targets Africa for future growth

The partnership, announced during the Future Health Summit in Abu Dhabi, will explore technology-enabled prevention and screening to support earlier disease detection and preventive models of care.

“This agreement marks an important step in our collaboration with Siemens Healthineers and reflects the complementary strengths of our two organisations,” said Kareem Shahin, CEO of M42’s Digital Health Solutions Platform and the group’s chief digital officer.

“By connecting population-scale digital health, healthcare data, and AI with advanced imaging, diagnostics, and medical devices, we can explore new ways to strengthen prevention and screening and help health systems act earlier,” he added.

Africa is the next frontier for healthcare transformation

Speaking to African Business on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit, Shahin said the company sees Africa as the next frontier for healthcare transformation, driven by growing digitisation, a young and educated population, and increasing adoption of mobile technologies.

“We at M42 believe that the next era of transformation and our focus market in the future will be the African continent,” he said.

“The digital health solutions and the technological advancement that happened in the last couple of years will help Africa, and especially the rural areas within Africa, to be serviced and to have better care,” he added.

He noted that the company is already engaging with governments and health authorities across the continent, citing its recent agreement with Botswana’s government. M42 and Botswana’s ministry of health in August signed a ten-year partnership to roll out a national genomics programme, digitise health records, and improve access to medicines.

He called on governments in Africa to strengthen public-private-partnership (PPPs) frameworks. “We’re very interested in public-private partnership in Africa. We know the success factor for any public-private partnership is to have legislation and executive sponsorship from the government.”

Prevention is better than cure

With populations living longer and healthcare costs rising, Shahin believes governments need to shift resources towards prevention rather than concentrating primarily on hospitals.

“The way to invest is really in preventive medicine, and preventive medicine is not the hospital; it’s the clinic, it’s the primary healthcare.”

He said connected digital systems can help clinicians intervene earlier, improve continuity of care and ultimately reduce the burden on healthcare systems.

Shaheen argues that many African countries can avoid the costly and fragmented approach of digitising the health system one facility at a time by adopting cloud-based healthcare infrastructure.

“We can do a cloud implementation, and then we just onboard the hospitals and clinics,” he said. “This will give us fast adoption for all of the clinics and the hospitals in Africa, and it will result in having less cost for the government.”

Bringing global expertise

M42, which is one of the founding partners of the Future Health Summit, was established in 2023 through the coming together of G42 Healthcare and Mubadala Health.

“We are divided into three main platforms. One is the global patient care platform, the other one is integrated health solutions, and the third one is digital health solutions,” Shahin said.  “We are in 27 countries, with more than 20,000 employees.”

He pointed to M42’s experience deploying virtual healthcare models, including projects in Jordan, where specialist services are delivered remotely from a central command centre. The model includes tele-consultation, tele-radiology, tele-ICU services and virtual hospitals, all aimed at reducing geographic barriers to care.

“Using these technologies, we can better serve Africa and help governments contain rising health expenditures,” he said. “We believe Africa is entering into an era of digitisation which can transform healthcare delivery across the continent.”