A national e‑Prescription Service in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chooses Rhapsody to speed onboarding of new customers and boost staff efficiency

A Saudi Government Special Purpose Vehicle has been established to deliver a public‑private partnership project to design, Build, Own, Operate, and Transfer (BOOT) a state‑of‑the‑art electronic
prescription platform. The organization aims to enable government hospitals and primary healthcare clinics (PHCs) to generate, transmit, and dispense e‑prescriptions through a network of
community pharmacies.

Through its engagement with NUPCO (National Unified Procurement Company), the organization 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:

• 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 inpatient length of stay and pharmacy wait times, thereby reducing administrative strain on hospitals

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 data trading partners, many of whom 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 data trading partners, but also to adapt to compliance standards and changing market needs.

Flexibility was also key because they planned to implement the solution across three environments. In addition, Rhapsody will be configured to act like an API Gateway to enable the exchange of data between external parties.

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 if a patient is allowed to request drugs from a pharmacy.

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

• Scheduling internal jobs to be initiated and run by Rhapsody to allow for automatic processes to run unattended
• Use as a Business Rules Engine, where Rhapsody decides on certain business rules and gives an almost‑instant response back to the customer’s internal components. For instance,
  business rules can validate if a patient is able to have drugs dispensed based on what is being requested and what has been dispensed in the past
• Message Queuing/Rate Limiting/Auditing on incoming and outgoing messages entering and exiting the customer’s e-prescription platform
• Integrating newly added systems into their platform, such as the clinical decision support system (CDSS)

“The Rhapsody solution has increased the productivity of multiple team members,” said the General Manager at the company financially backing the e-prescription provider. “Without Rhapsody, more developers might have been needed to develop and maintain the project’s integration configuration. The integration solution is intended to increase the usability of the platform by external vendors to further increase adoption. It has also helped some team members by automating jobs on their behalf, giving them more time to be productive in their areas.”

“In short, Rhapsody helps expedite time to value for our customers and ensures efficient use of our experts’ time.”

The customer is pleased with the Rhapsody processing power, ease of use, and manageability. “The capabilities of Rhapsody, including all the built‑in libraries and communications standards,
stability, efficiency, as well as the maturity of the solution and the helpfulness of the Rhapsody and Al‑Mozon support teams, are impressive,” said the same General Manager.

In addition, Rhapsody has been praised for the ongoing customer support and frequent software enhancements and upgrades that aim to fulfill emerging standards and quickly changing market needs.

Going forward, the customer plans to continue using Rhapsody to integrate with more external vendors and to automate communications with third‑party providers and source‑of‑truth registries to enhance the overall experience. In addition, they
plan to build more interoperability standards mappings and transformations to accelerate the adoption of the e-prescription platform across the Saudi market for vendors who are limited to certain messaging standards.