Saudi Arabia-based telecommunications company, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has introduced four digital initiatives to support the Kingdom’s health care providers in limiting the spread of COVID-19.
The initiatives strive to efficiently help the efforts of medical staff in hospitals and health facilities and securing the continuation of work remotely. These efforts come in line with the precautionary measures taken to reduce the spread of the virus in the Kingdom.
The digital initiatives introduced by STC constitute the “Virtual Clinic” service, which facilitates communication between patients and doctors, and the EMI service for managing, storing, and displaying medical images easily and remotely. The other two initiatives are “Tari” and “Fawran.” The former provides doctors and medical health care staff to initiate notifications in a manner that exceeds any other traditional system, and the later enables consumers who are in companies that trade with the field, security, or emergency operations to communicate safely through the PTT (push-to-talk) method.
Riyadh Saeed Muawad Senior VP of Enterprise Business Unit – STC
“These initiatives are part of the company’s efforts as a digital enabler and are in line with Saudi Vision 2030 to digitize the infrastructure of the health care sector and provide suitable services to facilitate and automate the work of our health care heroes so that we may overcome all challenges brought about by this crisis.”
The “Virtual Clinic” service, which is rendered through STC’s cloud computing solutions, extends a medical bag to estimate the patient’s vital signs at their place of residence. Through this service, doctors can view and evaluate a patient’s results and give medical advice to the patient seamlessly and precisely through a video call.
The EMI service coordinates the collection and retrieval of medical images either across departments of the same health care facility or between several health care facilities in a combined manner and with the right information systems. This guides to enhancing the patient’s experience and decreasing the time required by medical staff to dispense medical imaging reports in a way that benefits them to make medical decisions efficiently and flexibly.
The service is available in several geographical locations using cloud computing to provide data transfer and security to all beneficiaries.
The “Tari” service improves transmitting notifications and improves reliability. The service works through a range of notification channels that can be customized, such as an app, SMS messages, emails, machine communications, and Tera SDS. All of these channels save time, improve effectiveness, and support medical facilities to expedite the time required to give health care for emergency cases.
