The Case for Unified Electronic Health Records
Every GCC state is building its own EHR standard. That's a mistake we can still correct — if we act within the next 18 months.
The Gulf Cooperation Council’s economic integration has been, by any regional standard, extraordinary. Its health-data integration has not. Every member state is building an electronic health-record standard that doesn’t quite talk to its neighbor’s.
We’ve been here before. Europe spent fifteen years and several billion euros failing to harmonize. The lesson is unambiguous: the earlier you agree a common terminology and a shared identity layer, the less you pay later.
There’s a narrow window — maybe 18 months — before the national standards ossify. After that, the cost of convergence jumps by an order of magnitude. Now would be the moment for the GCC health ministers to pick a shared FHIR profile and commit to it publicly.
