A national e‑Prescription Service in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chooses Rhapsody to speed onboarding of new customers and optimize 3rd-party integrations

The national electronic prescription platform of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – Wasfaty – was established in 2018 to optimize the dispensing of medications in the public sector, promote private sector participation, and improve patient safety and experiences.

This program is implemented by NUPCO (National Unified Procurement Company), an organization that supports the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) Ministry of Health’s (MoH) 2030 Vision for Healthcare, which includes helping patients achieve positive health
outcomes outside the walls of health facilities, and modernizing the health system to provide efficient, quality services.

To achieve this vision, they required a comprehensive integration solution to support their electronic prescription platform, Wasfaty, that will:

• Increase drug availability by dispensing drugs through private pharmacies in various locations
• Improve patient safety by reducing medication errors with automatic checks of drug‑drug and drug‑allergy interaction
• Reduce costs for MoH and other health entities
• Save time and resources by reducing average pharmacy wait times, thereby reducing administrative strain on healthcare facilities
• Connect with other national systems that also use Rhapsody for integration

The Saudi Arabian healthcare ecosystem has seen significant investment, rapid growth, and an increasing need for innovative solutions to connect disparate systems. To succeed in this dynamic
environment, the customer required an integration solution that would be flexible enough to easily onboard external partner systems, many of which were limited to certain messaging standards.

The solution also needed to be highly configurable and easily scalable to not only accommodate a growing number of external systems, but also to adapt to compliance standards and changing market needs.

Flexibility was also key because they planned to implement the solution across the kingdom’s larger healthcare ecosystem, including national registries, notification systems, and other national healthcare applications.

After carrying out due diligence, Rhapsody stood out to the customer’s leadership team over competitors because of the strength and maturity of the integration solution. Other features, such as its out‑of‑the‑box libraries, HL7 support (including HL7 V2 and FHIR), ability to expose REST APIs (to orchestrate internal components), ease of use, and great customer service also impressed the customer.

In June 2020, Rhapsody was implemented in the cloud over three environments, with Active/Passive High‑Availability configuration in mind. Rhapsody and in‑region partner Al‑Mozon — a technology provider to health and government organizations operating across the Middle East — support the customer’s staff with training on general customer support skills, such as how to triage a ticket, how to troubleshoot, how to manage 24/7 on‑call, and how to escalate to Rhapsody in the event advanced assistance is needed.

Rhapsody provided a training course to their key team members, with instruction focused on best‑practices and implementation guidelines. Rhapsody also provided professional services consulting to help implement complex validation rules to decide on patients’ eligibility for dispensing medications at a pharmacy.

Within months of going live with Rhapsody Integration Engine in the Saudi market, the customer was already seamlessly processing millions of messages and supporting multiple other areas, including:

• Providing an opportunity to scale by scheduling internal jobs to be initiated by Rhapsody, allowing for automatic, unattended processes
• Delivering rapid responses back for customer’s internal components by leveraging Rhapsody as a business rules engine
• Monitoring and helping secure traffic through Message Queuing/Rate Limiting/Auditing on incoming and outgoing messages entering and exiting the customer’s e-prescription platform