Defining The Future Of Healthcare

Dr Rakesh Suri, CEO of Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, tells Gulf Business how the hospital has become a global healthcare pioneer in just four years, and why transparency has been key in its exponential growth

- Neil King

I meet Dr Rakesh Suri, CEO of Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi as the healthcare provider celebrates two landmark anniversaries in its recent history. “We just passed our four-year anniversary of opening our first service line in 2015 of ophthalmology, in March,” he tells me, “and our first heart surgery was done in June of 2015. So we’re at the four-year anniversary of that, too.”

It’s a four-year period that the CEO of one and half years is rightfully proud of, given the clinic’s growth of between 20 to 40 per cent year-on-year since opening its doors in the UAE capital.

The organisation launched in Abu Dhabi in 2015 following an agreement signed in 2006 between Mubadala Development Company and US-based Cleveland Clinic. The aim was to support the Abu Dhabi government’s Economic Vision 2030, which sought to develop a robust, world-class healthcare sector in the emirate.

And develop that it has. From the off, the clinic offered five centres of excellence in brain, eye, respiratory critical care, heart and lung, and surgical subspecialties. The final centre being a mix of ear nose and throat, urology, gynaecology, and more. Since then, however, CCAD has grown at pace, opening further centres of excellence, the UAE’s only multi-organ transplant centre, and a cancer care facility, among others. Add to that an ever-growing suite of education and resource offerings, and you have a rich and valuable mix that is playing an increasingly key role in the lives of UAE residents and growing numbers of overseas visitors.