Healthcare in Saudi Aramco

Saudi Arabia

Michael Walsh, CEO of Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare (JHAH), talks to The Energy Year about the joint venture formed between Johns Hopkins Medicine and Saudi Aramco, its health service responsibilities and how its healthcare centres are distributed across Saudi Arabia. JHAH is a full-service healthcare provider for Aramco employees, contractors and their dependants.

How was the joint venture between Aramco and Johns Hopkins Medicine formed?
Prior to the joint venture, Aramco ran its own health services. They started looking for an internationally renowned healthcare partner who could bring subject-matter expertise to the leadership and management of health services and world-leading expertise in service delivery and research and development.
The JV commenced in 2014, and Aramco is the majority owner of the joint venture. Prior to this, Aramco employees who required specialist care were sent out of kingdom – at a great expense – principally to Europe, the UK or the USA. One of the JV’s objectives is to keep more of that care here so patients can receive high-quality care close to home and family, improving their healthcare experience.

What are JHAH’s health service responsibilities?
We provide holistic, integrated, patient-centric healthcare services for around 150,000 Aramco employees and their dependants, and our own employees. We provide the full range of services, including illness prevention and health promotion, wellness, primary care, emergency care and hospital care. We have diagnostic equipment, radiology, pathology services, pharmacy services and more. We are self-sufficient.
We also provide healthcare coverage to those Aramco employees who live in the Eastern Province but are not near a JHAH facility.
In addition, when an Aramco employee or a dependant requires care in a place that is distant from us, we will review the type of care needed, coordinate with a healthcare provider and then pay for the service. We have contracts with about 25 other hospitals and healthcare facilities around the Eastern Province where we act as a third-party guarantor for healthcare.

How are the JV’s main healthcare centres distributed throughout Saudi Arabia?
JHAH has a large hospital in Dhahran and a smaller hospital in Al-Hasa. We also have three other 24/7 medical centres, which provide emergency response services.
Then there are around 60 remote-area clinics spread across the kingdom and offshore. They are associated with refineries, oil wells, pumping stations and other oil and gas production facilities. Wherever there is a reasonable number of either Aramco or contractor workers, we have a remote-area clinic.
Our facilities range from nurse-only clinics to larger clinics that have physicians and nurses. Increasingly we are trying to link different clinics as hubs using tele-health and digital capabilities.
JHAH’s aim is to have an overarching responsibility to Aramco to ensure we provide healthcare services that meet the needs of their employees. For example, we must be able to treat patients quickly at remote sites and transfer patients who need transfer in any circumstance, matching the nature of Aramco’s work as an oil and gas provider.

Does JHAH also provide services to Aramco contractors?
Originally, our services were only supposed to be for Aramco employees working in and around oil and gas facilities. Gradually we started servicing a mix of Aramco employees and contractors.
We also provide services to contractors at no cost.
For us, the most important part of our job is to ensure that these people have good, quick access to high-quality healthcare. We think that the remote-area clinics are a critically important part of the whole Aramco operation.

How prepared was Saudi Arabia for a global pandemic such as Covid-19?
The kingdom received a warning shot about Covid in 2012 when the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) alerted the kingdom that it should prepare itself for a potential pandemic, and so the country did.
Saudi Arabia had some good policies and procedures in place for responding to Covid. In addition, even before the country closed its land and sea borders, Aramco moved swiftly to form a Covid-19 task force. The company was also quick to implement safety precautions, such as remote working.
At JHAH, we worked with the company to provide information about the pandemic to employees and their families. This included a care line to answer questions about Covid-19, and in Dhahran JHAH opened the first drive-through testing station in the kingdom.
The goal was to protect workers and their dependants, while at the same time helping to minimise disruption. JHAH was also the first private-sector healthcare provider to offer Covid-19 vaccinations in the kingdom. Covid has certainly put pandemics, infectious diseases and their impacts “on the map” in terms of health risks.

How is your population health service of use for Saudi Arabia’s national healthcare policies?
We oversee Aramco’s employees and their dependants, and within this population, we study age groups and risk factors for different conditions, such as diabetes, and recommend wellness programmes, illness prevention and more.
Preventative work is increasingly becoming an important part of what we do for Aramco. The kingdom itself is trying to be more proactive by planning and introducing systems that encourage illness prevention and health promotion and slow down the lifestyle factors that promote cardiac disease, diabetes, respiratory disease and other illnesses.
The kingdom is changing its healthcare system. Namely, it is developing a more integrated system based on better primary care and a population health plan and introducing new ways of paying for healthcare.
Because Aramco has invested in the population health service for a long period of time, we have an excellent data warehouse covering many years. In most places in the kingdom, we have information about illness prevalence and the incidence rates of diseases in the population we serve, which is more or less representative of the kingdom’s population.

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