Ministry of Health (KSA) e-Services Portal

Story of a Successful Partnership

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I. Introduction

The Ministry of Health (MOH) has adopted a specific and comprehensive health vision: it seeks to ensure the highest level of healthcare for all Saudi citizens as well as foreign residents, to enhance public health, to prevent diseases, and to use cutting-edge technologies to provide convenient, trouble-free and rapid access to MOH’s health services through an online portal developed to meet the needs of MOH patrons.

II. Challenges

The Ministry of Health sought to overcome a set of challenges that hampered users of the MOH’s old portal, The challenges included::

• The old portal did not reflect the progress the MOH has made towards achieving full e-government and e-services transformation.
• The old portal did not meet the needs of visitors, mainly due to the lack of internationally recognized access and availability standards.
• The old portal’s content was incomplete and did not offer sufficient information to enable users to search for and access the relevant services.
• The old portal did not provide information about the MOH’s various departments, sectors and directorates.
• The old content was available in Arabic only, thus limiting access to the MOH’s services to Arabic-speaking users.

Naseej: “The content of the Ministry’s portal is characterized by compliance with the latest internationally recognized standards in terms of accessibility, thus enabling it to compete with world-class portals.”

III. Solution

• Designed a portal that reflects the Ministry’s transformation towards e-services and integration into the Government Service Bus.
• Developed a portal specifically designed to meet users’ needs while also complying with internationally recognized standards.
• Enabled users to search for and access relevant services via fully integrated e-content.
• Provided complete information on the Ministry’s various departments, sectors and directorates.
• Provided a professional English translation of the portal content to ensure that technical wording and quality control standards complied with adopted publishing policies to serve English-speaking patrons.

MOH: “The portal is characterized by its clear focus on the users, who are provided with ample facilities to share their views and suggestions with the Ministry through e-communication channels integrated into the portal interface.”

IV. Results

In six consecutive evaluations conducted by e-Government Program (Yesser) between February 20 and May 31, 2011, MOH’s portal was ranked first against nine other competitors in the last three evaluations in terms of complying with UN standards for Government Portals and Digital Content Management (see the following chart).

The last evaluation (99%) confirmed that the MOH and Naseej have been able not only to achieve excellence but also to maintain it through ongoing collaboration aimed at constant improvement.