Three young UAE-based innovators have developed AI tools aimed at tackling some of the most practical problems facing hospitals, from patients turning up at the wrong department to operating rooms sitting empty and elderly patients struggling to navigate healthcare systems.
The projects took the top three places at the inaugural AI Builders Summit 2026, organised by Burjeel Training Academy, with the winners selected from more than 100 applications and 19 finalists.
The winning project, developed by 21-year-old Hamdan Basheer, is an AI-powered triage and referral system designed to help patients identify how urgent their symptoms are, direct them to the appropriate medical specialist and prepare doctors for their consultations before the patient arrives.
Stay up to date with the latest news. Follow KT on WhatsApp Channels.
Basheer said the system is designed to tackle unnecessary visits to emergency departments while ensuring patients with genuinely urgent symptoms are identified quickly.
The tool starts with an AI conversation in which patients describe their symptoms verbally. Rather than simply asking a series of generic questions, the system can analyse the patient’s answers and generate specialist AI agents based on the symptoms.
For example, someone reporting chest pain could trigger separate cardiology and pulmonology AI agents, which “debate with each other” to determine the most appropriate medical pathway, Basheer said.
“If you just go to ChatGPT, it’s not going to give you the right answer, because it’s very general,” he said.
If the system determines that the case is not an emergency, it can recommend the appropriate specialist and help book an appointment.
The system then has a second role once the patient reaches the hospital.
Before the consultation, it can combine the patient’s reported symptoms with previous medical and health records to generate a report for the doctor, giving the physician a picture of why the patient has come in before the consultation begins.
Basheer said this could reduce the time doctors spend gathering basic information and allow them to see more patients.
The idea came after Basheer heard from clinical staff about people arriving at emergency departments with symptoms that did not require emergency treatment, contributing to overcrowding and potentially delaying patients who needed urgent care.
He said the system has been built but has not yet been implemented in a hospital.
He has tested it informally, including with a friend who initially thought he needed to see a cardiologist because of a rash. After asking additional questions, the system directed him towards a dermatologist instead.
The next step, Basheer said, is to work with a hospital to implement the technology in a real healthcare setting.
AI to stop operating rooms sitting empty
First runner-up Bilal Feroz Khan developed a different solution to another costly hospital problem — last-minute cancellations and unused operating-room time.
His project is an AI surgical operations platform that monitors whether patients scheduled for surgery are actually ready to undergo their procedures.
If a patient is suddenly unable to proceed, the system identifies the reason and searches through other scheduled patients to determine whether another patient meets the requirements to take the vacant slot.
The general idea is to prevent operating-room time, doctors’ time and money from being wasted, Khan said.
He illustrated the system with a knee-replacement patient who arrives on the morning of surgery but has not received anesthesia clearance.
Instead of simply cancelling the procedure and leaving the operating room unused, the AI would search the hospital’s list of patients for another case that is ready and meets the necessary requirements.
Khan said the idea was prompted by hearing about a patient who had missed surgery because of a last-minute change, leaving the hospital scrambling to find a replacement.
He has not yet tested the system in a hospital, but built a working demonstration in which an AI identifies a replacement patient from a list when a scheduled case cannot proceed.
The 21-year-old, a fourth-year computer science student, said he hopes to implement the system in a hospital and eventually develop other technology for different areas of medicine, including medical education.
AI healthcare companion designed around the patient
Second runner-up Khadeja Al Khazraji, 20, took a different approach, developing Sanedi AI, a multi-agent healthcare companion designed particularly around elderly people, children, amputees and people with accessibility needs.
The idea is to bring multiple parts of a patient’s healthcare journey into one place rather than requiring them to navigate several different applications.
The system can help with medication delivery, appointment booking and finding doctors, while also allowing users to interact with it through voice.
It can read information on the screen in Arabic or English and is designed to avoid medical jargon that patients may not understand.
Al Khazraji said the project was inspired by her grandfather’s experience with cancer and the difficulties her family faced navigating hospital visits, medications and healthcare applications.
“I saw how it was draining for my family to go to the hospital and come back,” she said. “I saw how frustrated he was because he didn’t know how to use those medical apps.”
The system is also designed to act as a healthcare companion.
If a patient tells the AI they are feeling dizzy, for example, it can review their medical history and previous doctor visits, assess whether the symptom could require attention, contact their caregiver and offer to book an appointment.
Another feature uses a phone camera to monitor a patient when a caregiver briefly leaves the room. If the system detects that the patient has fallen or stopped moving, it can alert the caregiver and ask whether help is required.
“It’s like a companion,” Al Khazraji said.
She tested the application with five pairs of people as part of university coursework and used their feedback to improve it, although it has not yet been tested with patients in a clinical setting.
Hospitals need AI that solves real problems
Dr Mujtaba Ali Khan, CEO of Burjeel Medical City, said the strongest ideas were those that could improve patient outcomes, improve the patient experience or remove administrative burdens from clinicians.
“Everybody hates waiting,” he said, adding that AI could also help doctors deal with the growing volume of information they need to process and make clinical decisions.
He highlighted AI-powered referral coordination as one example, where a system could recognise from a doctor’s documentation that a patient with a particular condition needs to see a specialist, identify the appropriate doctor and help coordinate the appointment.
Operating-room coordination was another area that stood out to him because hospitals need to make the most efficient use of surgeons’ time, operating rooms and the turnover between patients.
Khan said the winning projects would be invited to Burjeel Medical City to see healthcare operations “in real-time” and explore whether their ideas could be integrated into existing systems.
When asked whether the winning referral solution could potentially be implemented, he replied: “Why not?”
The goal, he added, is to find technologies that streamline operations, improve efficiency and potentially reduce costs while focusing on patient outcomes and experience.
Young outsiders asked to rethink healthcare
Dr Tahani Al Qadri, Associate Vice President at Burjeel Training Academy, said the competition was deliberately opened to people who were not necessarily from healthcare or IT backgrounds.
The aim was to get younger people to look at healthcare from outside the system, she said.
“We have been in healthcare for a long period of time, and we used to do things in our own way for a long period of time,” Al Qadri said.
The competition therefore encouraged participants to question established processes, including long patient waiting times, queue management, patient identification and how hospitals understand patients’ emotions and follow up on their cases.
The finalists included students from different academic backgrounds, with participants required to be aged between 20 and 28.
Al Qadri said several of the strongest ideas focused on the patient’s journey, including reducing waiting times, improving follow-up and managing medical records.
One project that caught her attention focused on measuring patient emotions, including whether a patient is stressed, satisfied, unhappy or frustrated by the hospital itself rather than by their illness.
She gave the example of a patient who is initially diagnosed with a headache but is later found to have a brain tumour.
“It is not enough to send him a message telling him that,” she said.
The hospital would need to consider how the diagnosis is communicated, potentially involving a consultant and psychologist and, in some cases, repeating tests before delivering the news.
That, she said, illustrates why healthcare AI needs to consider the entire patient journey rather than simply automate individual tasks.
The academy plans to hold the competition again next year and expand it internationally, with the aim of bringing in students from countries with very different healthcare systems and challenges.
“We need to know what is India doing? What is Africa doing? What is, for example, North America doing?” Al Qadri said.
“You will come up with an idea that you will never thought about.”
The three winners are also expected to be offered jobs with Burjeel, while finalists are expected to be involved in an AI club being developed with 42 Abu Dhabi.
Al Qadri said the finalists could help shape future editions of the competition, including its admission criteria and organisation.
The initiative, she said, is intended not just to identify ideas but to create a pipeline of young talent who could eventually help shape the future of healthcare at Burjeel.
Source: Khaleej Times