Khalil Alabdulwahab, chief commercial officer of Lean Business Services/Image: Supplied
Saudi Arabia’s healthcare transformation is entering a new stage—and Lean Business Services, a Public Investment Fund (PIF) company and the nation’s leading provider of integrated digital health and wellbeing solutions, is at its center. Having built the Kingdom’s foundational digital infrastructure, Lean is now shifting its focus toward what it calls “ecosystem activation”, a strategic evolution from platform development to large-scale citizen engagement and outcome-driven healthcare innovation.
“We have successfully built the foundational national health platform; now, success means activating it at scale,” said Khalil Alabdulwahab, chief commercial officer of Lean Business Services, on the sidelines of Global Health Exhibition 2025 in Riyadh. “Our key metric for success will be the demonstrable engagement of citizens in new preventive and digital health services. We are measuring the shift from reactive care to proactive health management.”
The company’s immediate focus is twofold: growing the health-tech ecosystem by integrating strategic partners and services into its national platform, and measuring tangible impact on population health. “Ecosystem growth and population engagement are how we will define progress over the next year,” Alabdulwahab explained. “It’s not just about user numbers anymore—it’s about the depth of interaction and the shift toward prevention and wellness.”
From infrastructure to intelligence
Established to build the Kingdom’s digital health backbone, Lean Business Services has become a pivotal enabler of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 Health Sector Transformation Programme. Over the past few years, Lean has delivered the platforms and data infrastructure that underpin national health initiatives, from patient records to public health surveillance. Now, its mission is evolving toward enabling interoperability, innovation, and practical outcomes across both the public and private sectors.
At the heart of this transition lies one of Lean’s most transformative initiatives: the Kingdom’s first healthcare “digital twin”. This technology, part of the Sehhaty and national public health systems, represents a paradigm shift toward personalised, predictive, and data-driven medicine. “The digital twin is the cornerstone of our personalised medicine strategy,” Alabdulwahab said. “We are moving it from concept to clinic by focusing first on high-impact areas, like chronic disease management and predictive public health.”
By leveraging AI and real-time data analytics, Lean’s digital twin allows clinicians to model treatment paths for a patient’s unique profile and predict potential adverse events before they occur. “Workflow integration is paramount,” he emphasised. “Our biggest priority is seamlessly embedding these complex, data-driven insights into a doctor’s daily decision-making process in a way that is simple, actionable, and, most importantly, trusted. This is a change-management challenge as much as it is a technical one.”
The integrator at the center of Saudi healthcare
As the Kingdom accelerates its public-private partnership (PPP) model in healthcare, Lean is serving as the central digital integrator—connecting ministries, hospitals, and private innovators within a unified, secure framework. “A successful partnership in this sector is not just a commercial contract; it is a unified commitment to solving a core problem for the nation’s citizens,” said Alabdulwahab.
“Lean embodies this principle,” he continued. “We are the central digital engine for the public health sector, but we operate with the agility of a private-sector technology company. We provide the secure national platform which allows best-in-class innovators to connect their technology into a unified ecosystem. We ensure that private-sector innovation directly serves the public good and accelerates the goals of Saudi Vision 2030.”
This approach has positioned Lean as the Kingdom’s leading health-tech orchestrator, balancing regulatory rigor with innovation. By enabling private firms to plug into national systems without compromising security or interoperability, Lean is transforming collaboration into a structured, scalable model—one that aligns every stakeholder around a shared objective: improving population wellbeing.
Building the data backbone for value-based care
Saudi Arabia’s healthcare strategy is shifting decisively toward value-based care, an approach that rewards outcomes over service volume and places patient experience at the center of performance metrics. “Value-based care is impossible without data,” said Alabdulwahab. “The entire model, which shifts focus from service to outcome, runs on the ability to securely capture and analyze a patient’s complete health journey.”
Lean’s national health platform acts as the data backbone for this model, providing what Alabdulwahab calls a “single source of truth” that enables providers and payers to measure outcomes, track costs, and identify at-risk populations. “By integrating preventive and lifestyle data, we are taking it a step further,” he added. “We are not just measuring what happens inside the hospital; we are providing a 360-degree view of health, enabling a true focus on wellness and prevention, which is the ultimate goal of both value-based care and Saudi Vision 2030.”
Through this data-driven ecosystem, Lean is empowering the government and healthcare providers to proactively manage chronic conditions, allocate resources efficiently, and deliver more equitable access to care—all while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.
Trust and data governance at national scale
Digital transformation in healthcare inevitably raises questions around privacy, consent, and ethical data use. As the operator of several major national health platforms, Lean sees trust as both its mandate and its most valuable asset. “Our single most important responsibility is ensuring data security and public trust,” Alabdulwahab said. “Trust is not a feature for us; it is our foundation. Our operations depend on it.”
The company enforces this principle through a dual approach—technical and strategic. “Technically, we operate under a privacy-by-design framework, adhering to the strictest national data governance standards set by authorities like SDAIA,” he explained. “All data is encrypted, held securely within the Kingdom’s borders, and managed with world-class security protocols.”
On the strategic front, Lean defines itself as a custodian, not an owner, of the Kingdom’s health data. “Our framework is built on citizen-centric control,” said Alabdulwahab. “Every partnership we sign is governed by these strict principles, ensuring the public’s data is used for their benefit and with their explicit consent. We are not just building a secure system; we are building a trusted one.”
At Global Health Exhibition 2025, Lean’s presence signaled not just its achievements, but its forward momentum. The company’s blend of national mandate and technological agility positions it uniquely to bridge innovation and governance—driving a health ecosystem where every citizen interaction, every dataset, and every partnership contributes to a healthier, more connected Saudi Arabia.
