About

Against the background of the Gulf region’s startling economic transformation, improvements in its healthcare facilities have seemed an inevitable development. These improvements, however, have been the result of a well-managed system integrating private and state institutions across the region. Operating at more than 200 client facilities, the Middle East operations of global healthcare information technology company Cerner has formed an important part of the regional integrated healthcare market. Legal issues have been at the heart of much of Cerner’s activities in the region, with everything from intellectual property, customer data protection and engaging with government policy. Led by Anis Zerriny, corporate counsel Middle East and Africa, the Cerner legal team is recognised for its contribution to some of the company’s ground-breaking recent projects. A number of Gulf States have made improvements in preventive medicine an important part of their vision statements, placing emphasis on private healthcare providers to come up with new ways of reducing costs. Cerner has been busy developing its digital medicine strategy by working with regional governments to develop a unified medical records system while exploring whether sophisticated algorithms could be applied systematically to its 10 million patient records in the Middle East. While this will change the way healthcare is provided to patients in the Middle East, it will also introduce a number of legal challenges around data privacy.