How can your Dubai based medical clinic become NABIDH compliant? Part 1 - Pre-NABIDH Preparation

In this article we will specifically cover the process your clinic needs to follow in order to become NABIDH connected. In case you want to find out what NABIDH is and why your clinic needs to be NABIDH connected, check out our earlier article.

The end-to-end process of becoming NABIDH connected can be categorised in 3 parts.

1. Pre-NABIDH Preparation
2. NABIDH Onboarding
3. Post-NABIDH Onboarding

We will cover the Pre-NABIDH Preparation in this article. Part II and III will cover NABIDH Onboarding & Post-NABIDH Onboarding, respectively. These articles will follow in later weeks. To get updates when they are published, you can just register your interest by sending a message on whatsapp or by subscribing to NABIDH updates. We strictly do not send any marketing info or any of that stuff. Our intent is only to assist clinics in their transition process to becoming NABIDH connected.

Pre-NABIDH Preparation

50% is the Tech

You need to understand that connecting to NABIDH will bring about changes in the way your clinic functions. Some changes can be significant. Ex: patient registration will have several additional mandatory fields. So your front desk needs to be put in extra effort to onboard new patients.

Some changes are minor - medicines have to be dubai drug coded. This can be done once in the back-end with no impact on your workflow.

The changes are aplenty. The right clinic management software provider will ensure that with the right mix of preferences and configuration, impact to your clinic is minimal. As an example, in Clinicea we launched a new feature of “Quick-Registrations” for NABIDH connected clinics. When a patient calls you or walks in for an appointment, you can book it by just filling in the patient name, dob and phone. That’s it, no long forms to fill out. Clinicea highlights all such patients with a sticker that shows registration is not fully complete. Only when you start the consult, or have some free time, do you need to focus on filling in the rest of the details. After the patient record is complete, data is automatically transmitted to NABIDH. So rather than stopping you midway in your workflow for compliance while you are busy on a call trying to book an appointment for a new patient, we instead ensure that workflow is made much quicker and compliance is relegated to the background with built-in automations.

There are scores of such examples. The takeaway is, getting NABIDH connected is not about just buying a compliant clinic management software. Connecting to NABIDH also has an impact on your clinic workflow. How major that impact is going to be has to be thought through. The way to go would be to share your existing workflow with a software vendor and get them to show the same in their current NABIDH connected platform. Be very attentive to the details during such a walkthrough. The devil lies in the details literally here. If the software can match your workflow, you know half the prep to connect to NABIDH is done, because the software will be taking care of this part through back-end rules, preferences and automations.

50% is You

Now let us go over the remaining half, where your active involvement is required.

1. A robust software platform will already know the mandatory data points you need to have ready, in order to be NABIDH connected. Ask them to provide you with a checklist. it provides you a framework to follow with no guesswork involved on exactly what needs to be done at your end. A well-made checklist will be like filling in the blanks, simple and easy. You just copy paste data from your word, excel or pdf files. Alternatively, you can just export data from existing software and send it back to your vendor to digest it all.
2. Next, your software vendor will provide you with a “NABIDH Agreement”.
   

   You need to have the following pieces of information ready in order to fill out the DHA agreement.

   • Sheriyan / Facility ID
   • Name of the Facility
   • Address of the Facility
   • Designation of the representative of the Facility
   • Email ID of contact person of the Facility
   
   

   Some tips on filling out the agreement.

   • You need to sign on all 35 pages in the Party 1 section.
   • Fill in both the English & Arabic section wherever applicable.
   
   

   Once done, reply back to our email by attaching the scanned copy.

   Note: It is not mandatory to put a company stamp on the agreement. But if you have one handy, please use it and put it on the last page where you put in your full signature.

3. We will share your signed agreement with the NABIDH Onboarding Team for review and approval. This should take 2-4 days.
4. Once the approval comes through, we will fill up the Facility Onboarding Template (FOT) spreadsheet and send it to the Onboarding team. This will be done at our end on your behalf.
5. Once the FOT is approved, we will goto the NABIDH Developer Portal and complete the Facility Group Registration for your clinic.
6. Finally, based on the clinic speciality, we will also identify the right kind of HL7 Message Triggers that are applicable to you. These triggers generate HL7 messages to NABIDH based on your activities within the software ie. recording a consult, registering a patient etc. It is important that only relevant messages are applied for in our request to NABIDH on your behalf.
   
   For every type of message we apply for, we need to generate test and live data to validate the ability of your clinic to send such a message to NABIDH as part of the onboarding process. Selecting incorrect message triggers for which data cannot be generated at your clinic as part of its regular workflow will result in your onboarding getting stuck, and at worse the clinic getting deboarded from the process. This is not an uncommon thing and does happen, delaying the clinic’s roadmap to NABIDH connectivities by several months.
   
   This is where our experience of working with clinics for the past 10 years comes in very handy. We are able to assess what is relevant to your clinic and accordingly make the right set of selections of HL7 Message Triggers out of the scores of options that are out there. It ensures your clinic's smooth transition to becoming NABIDH connected.
7. With that all is set. We will now email to the NABIDH Onboarding Team that you have completed the Facility Group Registration. You are now ready for the next phase of the Onboarding process.

Hope this helps to demystify the NABIDH onboarding process. In the next article we will go in-depth over what exactly happens during the NABIDH onboarding process. For any queries or questions, we are just an email or call away.