Obai Albashir

“There’s nothing more gratifying than having people stop me on the street to thank me because Mizan has helped them improve their health”

Obai Albashir (Global MBA 2015) isn’t one of those doctors who never leave the operating room. In fact in 2011 he founded Mizan Health, a startup dedicated to health education via social networks. Thanks to that project, which he calls his “greatest pride,” Forbes named him as one of the principal Saudi entrepreneurs.

“There’s nothing more gratifying than having people stop me on the street to thank me because Mizan has helped them improve their health,” he says. He even made a program on YouTube.

So Albashir is quite active. A few years ago he joined the health division of the EY international consulting firm, and he thinks that doctors should “get out of their clinics and mix with the public.” He adds that they have to change their way of thinking: it’s no longer enough just to treat diseases. Health workers and hospitals should “promote wellbeing.” Innovation and entrepreneurship, he warns, are also pending issues because “doctors are so immersed in exercising their profession that they sometimes reduce their contact with the culture of innovation and all the digital disruption.”

For Albashir, the future of healthcare means “more community centers, more solutions related to the prognosis and diagnosis of the patients, and more attention to prevention and wellbeing.” He says we’ll have to pay more attention to “artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual and augmented reality.” Big changes are coming.