A new digital assistant launched in the capital aims to tackle one of medicine’s most persistent complaints: doctors spend too much time on paperwork and too little with patients.
M42, the Abu Dhabi-based healthcare technology company, unveiled Ossi at the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit on Thursday. The platform is being rolled out at seven M42 centres across the UAE and Bahrain. The company estimates it can give doctors up to 60 per cent more time with patients.
Four assistants, one workflow
Ossi was developed with Microsoft and brings together several tools: AI agents, voice recognition and language models trained on healthcare material. Kareem Shahin, who leads M42’s digital health solutions platform and serves as group chief digital officer, said the system supports a doctor before, during and after a consultation.
It does so through four agents, each with a distinct job:
- Patient Summary Agent. Before the appointment, it pulls together a patient’s history, medications, laboratory results, radiology and recent visits into a single overview.
- Scribing Agent. During the consultation, it listens to the conversation and converts it into a structured clinical note for the physician to review.
- Chat Agent. The doctor can put questions to it about the patient’s information and ask for best practice based on available evidence and clinical guidelines.
- Coding Agent. Afterwards, it reviews the documentation and proposes the relevant medical codes used for billing and records.
Shahin said the aim is to keep the doctor’s attention on the patient rather than on a screen. In his telling, a physician no longer needs to hunt through scattered records during the appointment, because the summary is ready beforehand and the note is drafted as the conversation unfolds.
Hours of preparation, cut to minutes
He gave an example from oncology. A specialist preparing for a patient visit typically spends three to four hours reviewing the file. With Ossi, he said, that preparation could fall to 10 or 15 minutes, because the doctor receives only the relevant summary.
Those figures come from the company and have not been independently verified. Any real-world gains will depend on how well the system performs in busy clinics and how much doctors trust its output.
Designed to sit beside existing records
Ossi does not replace hospital electronic medical record systems. Shahin said it works alongside them, within the doctor’s existing workflow, so clinics do not need to rebuild their core systems to use it.
The final clinical decision stays with the physician, he stressed. The tool’s role is to save time, improve efficiency and make sure nothing in a patient’s history is missed.
Language, data and security
The platform currently understands Arabic and English, a practical necessity in a region where consultations often switch between the two. M42 is also working with international partners to add other languages, including Greek.
On data protection, Shahin said M42’s government healthcare platforms run on the UAE’s sovereign cloud. He said the company works with a dedicated security team in line with guidelines from the UAE Cyber Security Council. Ossi itself is cloud-based, and M42 plans to host it on Microsoft’s Azure platform, with ambitions to offer it to clients in other countries.
The name comes from the ossicles, the tiny bones in the middle ear that amplify and refine sound. It is a nod to the product’s role in capturing what is said in the consulting room.
Where it is available
The seven sites are Amana in the UAE, Amana in Bahrain, Healthpoint, HealthPlus, Mubadala Health Dubai, Sheikh Sultan bin Zayed Hospital, and the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre in Abu Dhabi.
The launch fits into Abu Dhabi’s broader push to build a digital health ecosystem, and it comes at a time when health systems worldwide are under pressure from ageing populations and clinician burnout. Reducing administrative load is one of the most frequently cited ways to ease that strain, but results will matter more than promises. Patients and doctors will be the judges of whether the extra time Ossi promises turns into better care. Next Article
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