Thoughts & Insights
Articles, ideas, and perspectives on technology, entrepreneurship, and digital health.
What Should We Take From Other Health Systems?
A similarity in one mechanism needs to be understood through its function and the conditions supporting it in that country before we can assess what to build locally.
Who Will Renew Your Digital Health Contract?
A user expecting a result gives you an opportunity to build a service they return to. The opportunity brings an obligation to deliver consistently and understand what it costs.
Health Coverage Starts With an Appointment You Can Get
What began as an experience of waiting became a question I keep returning to in service design: how do we give this person a clear route to the help they need, when they need it?
An Address Helps Define Responsibility for Access to Care
An address helps allocate responsibility and resources. The effort required for the person at that address to complete treatment deserves a place in the assessment of the service.
Prevention Needs Someone to Follow the Next Reading
The essential detail in any remote monitoring program is someone acting on the information. A device captures a reading, software transmits it, and the team assesses it in the context of the patient's condition.
A Good Referral May Take the Patient Outside the Cluster
I want to reward the quality of the decision and its result: appropriate care, better continuity, and considered use of resources — whether that happens inside the cluster or through a partner.
Primary Care Leads the Patient Journey
Health-system efficiency starts at the point that first receives citizens and directs their next step , that is the role of primary care.
Patients Need a Complete Care Pathway
The value of a consultation depends in part on the patient's ability to carry out what was agreed during it. A consultation, test, prescription, and medicine delivery are one service, not four.
Understanding Regulatory Responsibilities Is Part of Building a Health Product
A health founder needs to understand what each institution does. That understanding affects product design from the beginning: the data collected, permissions granted, services offered, and parties involved in a contract.
A Cluster's Independence Is Tested by Its First Purchasing Decision
A decision like this reveals how much independence an institution has in practice: does it understand the cost, can it choose, and can it verify what it purchased?
Building a Health System While Delivering Care
This is how I look at health transformation: an institution changing while it continues delivering care every day.
Who Looks After People Before They Reach the Clinic?
Visit records show who reached the service. Understanding the population also requires knowing who postpones care and what delays them.
The Payer Shares Responsibility for Care Quality
The payer's decisions on purchasing, approval, and payment schedules affect continuity and the provider's ability to maintain the required team, reaching the patient just as surely as clinical decisions do.
If Everyone Has AI, Who Has the Advantage?
Rock Health stopped tracking AI-enabled health companies as a separate category in Q1 2026. The competition has shifted to who owns the workflow, the data, the integration, and the outcome.
National Health Insurance: What Behavior Will We Pay For?
When I examine a payment method, I start with the decision it encourages doctors and managers to make. That is how a financial arrangement reaches the patient.
Positions End. Relationships Remain.
You'll leave every project eventually , but how you treated people will outlast the role far longer than you expect.
Your First Product Is Not an Incomplete Version. It Is a Question to the Market.
The debate around the HudHud app launch raised a bigger question: how should we evaluate a product when it first enters the market,as a final version or as the team's first instrument of learning?
We Gave Customers SAR 100,and They Still Did Not Use the Product
When we launched Cura, we assumed the problem was price and kept raising the free credit to SAR 100. Then we called the people who never used the service and discovered the real question had nothing to do with cost.
From Dialogue to Impact at WIL EU-GCC
I joined the launch of Women Impact Leaders EU-GCC in Riyadh as a speaker and workshop participant , contributing to the Health, Well-being and Sport track and reflecting on what it means to support women's leadership as a community responsibility.
The Hackathon Isn't a Real Race...
The recent debate makes it clear that many people don't actually know what hackathons are for. A hackathon doesn't produce real projects, and that was never the goal. Here are the six real objectives most organizers and participants miss.
The Big Bang Theory: A Show I Lived With for 12 Years
Some shows make you laugh. Others become part of a whole chapter of your life. For me, The Big Bang Theory was the second kind.
Vision 2030 Is an Operating System , Build on Top of It
AI Is Not the Future of Healthcare: It's the Present
After building Saudi Arabia's first virtual hospital, here's what I've learned about how AI is actually reshaping healthcare delivery today.
5 Lessons From Building Saudi Arabia's First Virtual Hospital
From a 2015 idea to $7M raised and 4M+ users: the unglamorous truths about building healthtech in Saudi Arabia.
Cybersecurity: Our Duty to Our Community
Verizon and Symantec studies reveal that just ten malicious emails are enough to breach any company with 90% success. The Dyre Wolf gang is a striking example of how cybercrime has evolved.
The Solomonic Design Principle: How to Filter for Desired Outcomes Automatically
From the wisdom of Prophet Solomon to the FillToHere line at Emery Worldwide to Van Halen's M&Ms: three stories that explain a single design principle that filters for desired outcomes with elegance.
Constructive Fights: How to Turn Disagreement Into a Building Tool
Intel runs workshops teaching employees constructive conflict. Five ideas from Bob Sutton, Debra Dunn, and Harvard Business Review for applying constructive confrontation in your workplace.
My Favorite Mistake This Year: The Story of Abu Abbas
I decided to choose the best mistake I made this year and talk about it with full transparency: hiring someone who didn't fit the team's culture taught me five priceless lessons.
Small Wins: The Progress Principle and How to Move Your Team
An entrepreneur wanted 30% growth during an economic recession. How she turned an impossible goal into a hundred yellow sticky notes and achieved more than she planned.
The Assertive Leader: The Middle Ground Between Aggression and Passivity
What is assertiveness really? Research by Daniel Ames and Frank Flynn from Columbia University, and Tommy Lasorda's pigeon metaphor: the fine line between assertiveness and its two extremes.
The True Leader is Attuned and Assertive: You Are on Stage All the Time
The Berkeley cookie experiment reveals what people do the moment they take a leadership position. Four core leadership problems and how the attuned, assertive leader overcomes them.
Routine Work vs. Innovative Work: Or When Killing Your Babies Is a Good Thing
WD-40 got its name from 39 failed attempts. A toy company starts with 4,000 ideas and ends with 3 successes. The fundamental difference between routine and innovative work, and how to lead between the two.
How to Fail the Right Way: Ten Principles for the Innovation Leader
Failure is inevitable in innovative work. The difference between a successful leader and everyone else is how they make failure small, early, safe, and generative.
How Do You Live at the Intersection? The Medici Effect and the Art of Inspiration
Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect, Diego Rodriguez, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and the Windows Metro design: how do you live at the intersection of humanity and technology?
Introduction to Innovation Leadership & Entrepreneurship: My Personal Journey
From KFUPM to Microsoft to Xceed Ventures: an introduction to a blog series on leading innovation, and my studies at Stanford under Professor Bob Sutton.
Innovation and Creativity: The Idea Alone Is Not Enough
Innovation = Creativity + Application. From the Apple iPod to the People magazine yearbook: how creative ideas become real innovations.
Digital Reading and Saudi Youth: A TV Interview on Al-Thaqafia Channel
In an interview on Saudi Arabia's Al-Thaqafia Channel I discussed modern digital reading: GoodReads, Amazon Kindle, and how Saudi youth are being shaped by the digital reading movement.
The Ego in the Quran
The story of the ego in the Quran is summed up in: 'Has there not come upon man a period of time when he was not a thing even mentioned' , and prayer reduces the ego and reconnects a person with their essence.
Three Stories from A New Earth: Don't Resist, Don't Judge, Don't Attach
From Eckhart Tolle's 'A New Earth': three profound stories that teach conscious living , So be it!, Maybe!, and This too shall pass.
Napoleon Defends the Prophet ﷺ Against Voltaire
Voltaire's 1816 play that mocked the Prophet ﷺ , and how Napoleon Bonaparte, one of Voltaire's greatest admirers, rose to defend the Prophet with remarkable words.
Farewell to My Microsoft Family
After seven incredible years, I leave Microsoft with a lifetime family, strong career, and tons of life-shaping experience. A farewell letter to the people who made it all possible.
There Are No Bad Intentions: A Theory Worth Contemplating
Is it true that all intentions are good and that only actions can be judged? A philosophical theory worth contemplating in light of the Quran and the words of philosophers.
Intellectual Property in Islam: A Lost Principle in Our Culture
Islam established the principle of intellectual property before the modern world knew it. The science of Hadith is a complete model for preserving intellectual rights. Where do we stand today?