Running a clinic in Dubai comes with its load of regulatory and compliance requirements. Nabidh is a key compliance item for most DHA or DHCC-licensed Dubai clinics. Nabidh is the DHA's database of medical data.
Facilities must send data to Nabidh, and failure to do so may result in fines and liability for the clinic or hospital. This all sounds a bit scary and complicated, but the goal of this article is to help you understand how Nabidh works, and how to comply.
At Oryx, we've had the opportunity to work with Nabidh and help onboard countless clinics in Dubai, so we hope our insights can be useful to clinic owners, doctors, and prospective clinic founders.
What is Nabidh?
Nabidh is a database of Dubai's medical data. It concentrates data from all facilities to produce a definitive, centralized view of a given patient's medical history. Only Nabidh has access to the consolidated view.
Clinics are required to send data to Nabidh, and typically don't need to receive data from Nabidh. In that sense, Nabidh is purely a reporting service from the standpoint of clinics.
Nabidh uses HL7, an international standard for medical data communication. This is an example of a HL7 message:
MSH|^~\&|Best Clinic||NABIDH|DHA|20260810184909||ADT^A08|1786373349087_153|T|2.5||||||UTF-8
EVN|A08|20260810184909||||20260810184909|SHERYAN^0000000
PID|1||9864^^^^MRN||Jane^Doe^^^^^D||19750115|F|||^^Unknown^Unknown^^001^H||+07000000000^PRN^CP~^NET^Internet^jane@doe.com|+07000000000^WPN^PH|UNK^^NAB024|U^^NAB002|VAR^^NAB003||784197550601040|||||||||Emirati^^NAB038||N|O||20260810184909|
PV1|1|O|Dental Clinic^^^0000000^^^^^Best Clinic|R|||12345678^John^Foo^^Dr.^^^^SHERYAN||12345678^John^Foo^^Dr.^^^^SHERYAN|DEN||||P|||||1234|||||||||||||||||||||||||20260810184726
This message contains data about Jane Doe's visit with Dr. John Foo at "Best Clinic". Needless to say, these messages are mostly meant to be sent and read by computers.
Fundamentally, this is all Nabidh is about: for every small event in your clinic, you must produce a HL7 message and send it to Nabidh. The structure and contents of a HL7 message must perfectly match Nabidh's specifications to be accepted.
But how do clinics send messages to Nabidh in practice, and how to get started?
Sending data to Nabidh
A message like the previous one must be sent as soon as a patient enters the clinic's premises. Clinics must then have a software system to track a patient's status, generate such HL7 message, and send it to Nabidh.
All clinics use EMR software to help with this. An EMR (Electronic Medical Records) is basically clinic management software. It helps track patients, maintain a medical chart, helps with the scheduling of appointments, etc...
Some EMRs integrate natively with Nabidh, meaning they are already able to produce HL7 messages and send to Nabidh on your behalf. A list of such EMRs can be found on Nabidh's website: https://nabidh.ae/#/comm/connectedemr
If you're a clinic owner, a good place to start is to go through this list, and make sure your EMR partner is listed. It's important for Dubai clinics to work with Nabidh-certified EMRs to make sure you can send messages to Nabidh seamlessly.
We'll speak soon about liability below, and you'll see that it's important for clinics to pick the right EMR partner to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Now that you've picked a Nabidh-certified EMR, such as Oryx Medical AI, and that you're ready to open a clinic, what's the next step?
Start your onboarding on Nabidh
Your facility now needs to register on a Nabidh batch to get onboarded. A batch is a group of clinics that want to integrate with Nabidh (or renew their integration).
Nabidh accepts clinics in batches, not "one-by-one". The calendar of Nabidh's batches can be found on their homepage (scroll towards the bottom of the page): https://nabidh.ae/
To get in a batch, you must first reach out to Nabidh and tell them you have the intention to onboard your facility. You must submit documentation, including your DHA/DHCC licenses, amongst other things.
Usually, your EMR partner assists you with this. This could be the publisher of the EMR software, or a consultant you work with, etc... If you choose Oryx Medical AI, you'd be speaking directly to the developers of the EMR, meaning real experts in software and integration, not just salespeople.
An important document Nabidh requires is a letter of commitment to your EMR. Onboarding on Nabidh takes time and requires resources from the Nabidh team, so facilities are discouraged from switching EMRs too often.
Switching EMR means having to do a new onboarding! That is why picking the wrong EMR and deciding to change it after opening your clinic has the potential to disrupt your business and operations significantly.
The onboarding process
Now that you're onboarding, your facility must prove it can send valid and accurate medical data to Nabidh.
In practice, your EMR partner is the one going through these steps. Depending on their experience or competence, you might be more or less involved in the process.
Ideally, as a clinic owner, you should barely think about it. Nabidh's process involves several layers of validation of the EMR's software capabilities to maintain compliant and accurate medical data, and produce valid HL7 messages.
This process can take months, even for Nabidh-certified EMRs, as Nabidh thoroughly tests EMRs for every single clinic onboarding.
During that process, Nabidh requires total cooperation and quick communications with your EMR partner.
Failure to respond to Nabidh's requests quickly can result in facilities being off-boarded, which would be... pretty bad news for your clinic, and could delay your operations by months as you try to onboard onto the next batch!
That is why it's best to vet your EMR provider and make sure they are up for the task, even if they have been certified in the past.
Oryx Medical AI is the only EMR that displays a Nabidh onboarding dashboard directly on the software. You can connect and track the progress of your onboarding in real-time.
New clinics want to open without being delayed by Nabidh's batch calendar. Clinic owners know very well that time is money. Rent, salaries and marketing expenditure don't wait for Nabidh's approval.
Usually, clinics should be ok to operate without the risk of fines if they are at least scheduled for a Nabidh batch.
However, DHA and Nabidh's guidelines and regulations are fast-changing, so it's best to confirm with your EMR partner that you are indeed making progress on your onboarding, as failure to make progress may be considered failure to comply.
Almost there!
You're nearly there! A few weeks (or months) have passed, you've signed all of the paperwork, and you've successfully been onboarded! Congratulations, surely now you can just relax, right? Well... It depends.
Despite having passed Nabidh's battery of tests and tribulations, your EMR partner has only done half of the job. Now, they have to make sure to monitor systems closely, and continue to produce compliant HL7 messages.
Nabidh's guidelines and specifications evolve over time, and it's important for your EMR to stay up-to-date and react quickly to new requirements.
Your EMR partner must also maintain consistency in sending Nabidh messages, as missing even a few days of data will cause your facility to receive a warning.
Importantly, despite the EMR being the one to design the integration, liability is on the facility in case of non-compliance.
This is where dealing with consultants and publishers for your EMR gets a bit dangerous, because when new requirements must be implemented, your request may take a lot of time before reaching an actual software developer.
With Oryx Medical AI, we are physically present in Dubai and real software engineers like myself (not salespeople) can meet you at your clinic to discuss improvements and requirements.
Nonetheless, achieving Nabidh integration is a great milestone, so once it happens, you should definitely celebrate!
How Oryx handles it
If you're evaluating EMR software in Dubai, Nabidh integration is key.
Oryx Medical AI is the only EMR in Dubai that doesn't charge upfront fees for setup and Nabidh integration. So if you're looking for a compliant, easy-to-use EMR with a lot of automations, do reach out to our team!