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BlogsSaudi Arabia’s healthcare sector is moving toward a more efficient, automated, and patient-focused model. Hospitals are now rethinking the entire patient journey, from the moment a patient checks in until they complete their visit, to create a smoother, faster, and more reassuring experience. Technologies for smart patient journey, such as integrated queue management, digital wayfinding, AI-driven triage, and virtual care are becoming essential tools in this transformation.
This national shift was reinforced at the recent Global Health Exhibition in Riyadh, where smart health solutions, telehealth, and teleconsultation took the spotlight. The event highlighted the growing commitment to modernizing its healthcare ecosystem and adopting innovations that enhance both patient comfort and operational efficiency.
A smart patient flow management system gives hospitals a structured way to guide patients through registration, consultation, diagnostics, and final checkout. By unifying key components such as self-service kiosks, dynamic ticketing, digital signage, and real-time prioritization, hospitals can create a predictable, organized flow that enhances patient experience and strengthens operational efficiency.
Self-registration and Check-In
Self-service kiosks simplify the start of the patient journey by allowing quick registration, appointment verification, and service selection. This reduces manual load on front-desk staff and helps patients begin their visit without confusion or delays.
Unified and Dynamic Ticketing
With a single, unified ticket, issued through a kiosk, mobile app, or a tablet, patients can navigate all required hospital departments without holding multiple slips. A dynamic ticketing engine assigns numbers and routes patients based on appointments, service type, urgency, or priority groups such as elderly patients. This keeps the flow fair, responsive, and well-coordinated.
Digital Signage and Real-Time Updates
Digital signage provides patients with clear guidance at every step. Screens display queue status, expected waiting times, directions to the next service point, as well as educational and promotional content. This transparency reduces frustration, improves movement inside the hospital, and ensures patients always know where they need to go next.
By providing every patient with a single ticket, hospitals can streamline the flow of patients and offer them quality service. An integrated single-ticket system with queue management can organize the patient queue, thus effectively reducing physical queues in any healthcare facility.
Besides, patients are issued a single, unified token on arrival – using a self-service kiosk, mobile app, or from the receptionist's counter.
This single token is sufficient for them to receive the required care at any of the hospital's departments, be it the pharmacy, pathology lab, or doctor's clinic.
An AI-powered queue management system can automatically prioritize patients based on their age, medical condition, or urgency.
In larger hospitals, patients can feel "lost" while navigating through the entire journey from the initial check-in to the final discharge. Hence, smart hospitals can make this easier by integrating digital navigation tools in their wayfinding solutions.
By integrating digital wayfinding into queue management, hospitals can deliver a seamless patient experience while providing them with clear navigational information at every stage. Digital signage can also deliver useful information based on the patient's needs.
For instance, they can provide color-coded indicators for specific services in the hospital facility. Hospital staff and administrators can also focus on providing patient services instead of simply directing them to their next stage.
Patient feedback is crucial for improving healthcare operations in Saudi-based hospitals and medical facilities. An advanced queue management system effectively stores patients interactions at every touch point in their journey, which can lead to actionable insights for operational improvements. With these real-time insights, hospitals can improve their patient flow process, lower their waiting time, and improve staff efficiency.
Here are some of the key data metrics that are useful for analytics:
Saudi Arabia’s healthcare sector is experiencing comprehensive transformation, driven by Vision 2030’s focus on improving accessibility, quality, and efficiency of care. The government’s investments in advanced hospital infrastructure, digital health systems, and workforce training are improving the patient experience from admission to discharge.
Saudi hospitals are adopting patient flow management systems to streamline patient movement across departments. By managing appointments, queues, and prioritization digitally, these systems reduce waiting times, ease congestion, and improve coordination—delivering a smoother patient journey. Additionally, hospitals are increasingly integrating self-registration and check-in kiosks equipped with multilingual interfaces to cater to diverse populations, including expatriates and non-Arabic speakers. These systems enhance accessibility and user-friendliness for all patients. A highlight of these self-service kiosks is advanced national ID verification, enabling secure, real-time integration with government and health databases.
This automates patient identification while reducing errors, speeding up registration, and strengthening data accuracy. These digital touchpoints reflect the broader e-health initiative underpinning Saudi’s healthcare transformation, supporting expanded health access, reduced administrative burdens, and improved patient experiences.
In alignment with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the Kingdom’s healthcare sector is moving toward a more digital, patient-centric model, powered by technologies such as virtual care, telehealth, self-service kiosks, and intelligent queue management. Building efficient, seamless, and culturally aligned patient journeys is now central to delivering world-class care.
As a long-standing technology partner to hospitals across Saudi Arabia and the wider region, SEDCO plays a key role in enabling this transformation. Through its smart patient flow management systems—adopted by Dallah Hospital—hospitals can better orchestrate appointments, queues, and service prioritization. This leads to reduced waiting times, eased operational bottlenecks, and improved coordination across departments.
Beyond patient flow, SEDCO’s healthcare portfolio extends to teleconsultation platforms and its AI-powered Telehealth Pod, which together expand access to care beyond traditional hospital walls. These solutions enable remote consultations, self-measurement of vital signs, intelligent medical triage, and seamless integration with hospital systems—supporting continuity of care while optimizing both clinical and operational efficiency.
More recently, SEDCO announced a strategic partnership with Al Maali Hospital, acting as its trusted consultant and provider of smart healthcare solutions. In parallel, SEDCO introduced its latest healthcare innovation—the Telehealth Pod—further reinforcing its commitment to advancing smart, accessible, and digitally enabled healthcare delivery in the Kingdom.
If you’re ready to modernize your hospital operations and deliver a truly exceptional patient experience, SEDCO’s integrated queue management system is designed to support you every step of the way.