At a Healthcare World panel during Abu Dhabi Global Health Week, Emma Sheldon MBE, CEO of Healthcare World, chaired a high-level discussion on one of the most pressing challenges in global healthcare today: how to transform the vast quantities of data generated by health systems into meaningful, actionable insight that improves patient outcomes and supports sustainable delivery. Bringing together leaders from the US, UK, and Middle East across law, consultancy, hospital operations, and patient experience, the conversation highlighted both the scale of the opportunity and the complexity of the task.
Together, they explored how health systems can move from simply storing data to harnessing it—creating trust, enabling AI, empowering patients, and building resilience for the future.
Building trust
Julie Coope opened the session by pointing to the most basic but often overlooked challenge: knowing where data is, how secure it is, and whether it can be used. “I spend my time asking clients if they even know the fundamentals—where their data sits, whether it’s in the right format, whether it’s secure. Without that, all the promises of AI fall flat.”
At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California, one of the top US hospitals, data is embedded into every aspect of hospital life—from treatment planning to operational improvements. For Alan Dubovsky, the biggest shift is how patients themselves are engaging with data. The hospital has an open-notes policy giving patients direct access to their clinical records, transforming them from passive recipients to active participants in their care. But as transparency increases, so do the risks of misinterpretation. “Patients see their results instantly, often before we’ve explained them,” he said. “The challenge isn’t resistance—it’s how to translate complex information into meaningful, human language.”
For Shiraz Bajwa, who leads operations at one of the UAE’s largest hospitals, the task is cultural as much as technical. “Clinicians often see data as something done to them—but in reality, they are the creators of it. When they see that, engagement improves.” By reframing data as something generated by providers, not imposed externally, he has seen a shift towards ownership and sustainability. But he has also seen the staggering pace of data creation: “Humanity now generates five exabytes of data every two days—the same amount we produced from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. The question is: what are we doing with it?”
Maximising the data
Drawing on his background in aerospace, Bajwa compared healthcare operations to aviation. “The accuracy you need to land a plane safely isn’t the same for operational improvement,” he explained. The key is knowing the purpose—whether the data is for research, clinical care, or executive decision-making—and ensuring it is good enough for that context.
Gerard Hanratty warned that without common definitions and centralised management, organisations fall into silos, producing conflicting reports that drive poor decisions. His call was for standardisation, accessible platforms, and a culture of trust.
For Charlotte Ashton-Khan, data should not be “owned” by anyone, but stewarded by those closest to it. Empowering clinicians, nurses, and operators to shape how data is captured and used is, in her view, the only way to embed sustainable practice.
Data governance and quality are not glamorous, but without them, organisations risk building innovation on sand. Dr Manel Boufaied highlighted the importance of comparability. “Global benchmarking only works if you know what’s in and out of a KPI. Whether it’s the US, UAE, or elsewhere, without clear definitions, the numbers are meaningless.”
The panel agreed that the future of healthcare is not simply about being data-driven, but data-centred. That means embedding stewardship, governance, and patient partnership into the fabric of health systems. “Patients are on this data journey with us,” Alan Dubovsky commented. “We cannot just collect and analyse—we need to share, explain, and empower.”
Emma Sheldon summed up the discussion: “Data is healthcare’s greatest asset and its greatest vulnerability. The challenge is to build systems, standards, and cultures that allow us to turn information into trusted insight—insight that clinicians can act on, and patients can believe in.”
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