Healthcare systems cannot outpace the people who run them. Human capital must scale alongside technology, because a system that grows faster than its people eventually collapses under its own complexity, said Albarah El-Khani, senior vice-president, Operations at M42.

El-Khani highlighted the importance of aligning innovation with human capital, operational efficiency, and societal impact to truly transform care.

"I encourage my fellow senior executives to think of our pilot programmes that have a defined path to policy. Otherwise, it's a prototype and not innovation," El-Khani said during a conference on Wednesday.

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Organised by Khaleej Times, senior healthcare leaders from the public and private sectors across the region attended the 5th Future of Healthcare Summit 2025. Held under the theme of "Echoes of Tomorrow | Building the Future of Care," the summit highlighted how healthcare is being transformed through innovation, technology, and strategic collaboration.

He stressed that sustainability has four dimensions: financial, operational, environmental, and societal.

"Financially, we must move towards a value-based care model that rewards outcomes and not activities. This aligns perfectly with our national health reforms, which are redefining performance metrics across hospitals and insurers. Operationally, sustainability implies using digital tools to reduce waste of time, resources, and human potential," he said.

He also highlighted that the Ministry of Health and Prevention's (Mohap) green Hospital Initiative aligns with health outcomes and climate responsibility, and societal sustainability means keeping patients and communities at the centre.

The Senior Vice President of Operations at M42 noted that systems that survive are not necessarily the largest or strongest, but rather those that can adapt, scale, and sustain themselves.

"Our systems are now tested by forces that evolve faster than our responses. Be it pandemics, climate shifts, cyber threats, workforce instability, and destruction, the technology that rewrites the rules overnight. So the real question is, how do we design systems that help us change and not just survive it? The answer lies in three basic principles – adaptability, scalability, and sustainability. And across the UAE, we are already seeing these being woven into the foundations of care," he told the audience while delivering the keynote address at the conference.

He noted that adaptability begins in the architecture.

"When Covid-19 struck, our collective challenge wasn't only medical but structural. Resilience was tested, and we learned that it cannot be reactive, ensuring designs can save systems from faltering," he added.

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