Asset performance management for a Kingdom’s hospitals

The chapter: Riyadh, mid-pandemic

Ascend is part of the Al Fozan Group and the solution partner of GE Healthcare in Saudi Arabia. It was the delivery partner that established the National Health Command Center, the Ministry of Health’s AI-enabled hub for demand and capacity management across roughly 494 hospitals, 2,259 primary care centers and 75,000 beds, visualized on 88 dashboards.

I did not build the NHCC itself. I led the 25-person team, senior engineers, DevOps, designers, QA and mobile developers, that built the asset performance management platform (Enoviimax) and the hospital operations automation platforms integrated into it. Nationwide medical-equipment tracking, real-time telemetry from device fleets including GE devices, preventive and corrective maintenance automation, inventory and scheduling, all under formal uptime SLAs.

I was the center point between the technical and non-technical higher-ups: part of every product decision with leadership, daily with PMs and product owners. The hardest constraint was that the healthcare system these platforms served was under maximum stress while they were being built.

A maintenance platform for ventilators cannot go down in a pandemic.

The stakes. The NHCC was coordinating ventilator distribution and ICU capacity Kingdom-wide. Alharbi et al. (BMJ Leader, 2025) report first-wave contributions of under 2% mortality, ICU stay reduced 10%, and supply-chain lead time cut from 60 to 25 days. That is the program my team’s platforms fed.

The program

In 2019 the Saudi Ministry of Health established the National Health Command Center in Riyadh: a central, AI-enabled hub for data-driven healthcare and demand-and-capacity management. Four departments, four zones, real-time data integration visualized on 88 dashboards, machine-learning analytics feeding decisions. It connects roughly 494 hospitals, 2,259 primary healthcare centers and 75,000 beds, and manages emergency demand, ICU capacity and the distribution of critical assets such as ventilators across regional health clusters.

Then COVID arrived, and the NHCC became the place where a Kingdom’s pandemic response was coordinated.

Ascend Healthcare Solutions, part of the Al Fozan Group and GE Healthcare’s partner in Saudi Arabia, was the delivery partner that established the NHCC. Ascend also delivered the Wasfaty Operations Center, the Seha Virtual Hospital, the COVID-19 Vaccination PMO and the National Mass Testing Program.

What I built, precisely

I did not build the NHCC. I led the team that built the platforms integrated into it.

Three automation platforms advanced MedTech in the Kingdom during that period, and my team of 25 owned them:

1. Asset performance management SaaS (Enoviimax). Nationwide tracking of medical equipment, with real-time telemetry from device fleets including GE medical devices. Equipment performance optimization, maintenance cost reduction driven by live data, inventory management, maintenance scheduling, and faster support response for national hospitals.
2. Preventive and corrective maintenance workflow automation across nationwide assets. The scheduling, escalation and closure loops for keeping equipment in service.
3. Hospital operations automation for facilities under the NHCC umbrella.

The stack was Laravel at the core, Python and Node.js services where they fit, and React on the front.

The constraint that shaped everything

A maintenance platform for critical medical equipment cannot go down. The formal uptime and SLA requirements were not paperwork; ventilators in a pandemic were the assets being tracked. The healthcare system these platforms served was under maximum stress while we were building them. Every release decision was made with that in mind.

My role beyond the code

I was the center point between the technical and the non-technical higher-ups. I sat in every product decision with leadership and worked daily with PMs and product owners. The 25 people I led were cross-functional: senior engineers, DevOps, designers, QA and mobile developers. That combination, national scale, formal SLAs, and a cross-functional team with executive exposure, is what I carried forward into second-line leadership at Tanbits.

Program outcomes, framed honestly

Alharbi et al. (BMJ Leader, 2025) describe the NHCC’s reported first-wave contributions: bending the curve early with under 2% mortality, ICU length of stay reduced by 10%, supply-chain lead time cut from 60 to 25 days, reduced surgery waiting times, increased bed capacity and rapid deployment of staff and ventilators. These are reported contributions from a descriptive case study of the program, not controlled-trial causation, and they describe the program my team’s platforms fed, not my platforms alone. That is exactly how I present them.