Abstract
Background: Digital-service volume, composition and clinical effectiveness answer different questions. Aggregate records can describe the distribution of activity across service channels, but they cannot identify unique users, substitution for in-person care or the effect of artificial intelligence. This study describes Eastern Saudi Arabia's recorded digital-channel composition while retaining the official administrative areas and a national reconciliation.
Methods: An exploratory descriptive reconstruction used Table 4-71 of the Ministry of Health (MOH) Statistical Yearbook 2024. Twenty health-cluster rows were mapped to thirteen administrative regions. The SEHA Virtual Hospital (the source-listed national service name) and Others source rows remained unallocated national services. The three fields were completed primary-care virtual appointments, completed hospital virtual appointments and virtual instant consultations through Sehaty. Counts were added before computing channel shares and a concentration index equal to the sum of squared shares. A published five-region aggregation was retained as a secondary display. National counts were reconciled against the official total; no patient-level inference, significance testing or effectiveness estimate was introduced.
Results: Eastern recorded 746,769 completed primary-care virtual appointments, 955,464 completed hospital virtual appointments and 293,210 Sehaty instant consultations, totaling 1,995,443 recorded events across the three channels. Their shares were 37.42%, 47.88% and 14.69%, respectively. The channel concentration index was 0.3909. The compatible national total, including unallocated services, was 9,314,304 events. Unallocated national rows contributed 42,359 events and were not assigned to Eastern or distributed among the regions. Primary-care shares varied across thirteen administrative regions, while the broad-region comparison retained Central, Western, Eastern, Southern and Northern.
Conclusions: The source supports a reproducible description of Eastern's recorded service-channel mix. It does not establish population uptake, unique-user access, clinical benefit, reduced in-person utilization, artificial-intelligence effectiveness or care quality. Related Saudi utilization studies and a yearbook-based regional analysis overlap with this description.
Keywords
- Telemedicine
- Remote Consultation
- Primary Health Care
- Health Services Administration
- Saudi Arabia
Declarations
- Ethics approval
- NA
- Consent to participate
- NA
- Consent for publication
- NA
- Funding
- NA
- Competing interests
- NA
- Author contributions
- NA
- Data availability
- NA
- Registration
- NA
- Acknowledgements
- NA
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