If you’re not sure exactly what that means for your business, or whether your current software is really up to the job, this guide is for you.
What a health information exchange actually does
Think of an HIE as a secure network that brings together patient records from every connected hospital, clinic, lab and pharmacy into one shared record. A doctor at your clinic can see the diagnoses, lab results, allergies and medicines recorded somewhere else. Your pharmacist can see what a patient has already been dispensed across town.
For your patients, that means fewer repeated tests, fewer dangerous drug interactions and better care in an emergency. For regulators, it’s a real-time view of the nation’s health. And for you, it’s now a compliance obligation that affects your licence.
The three UAE exchanges
Which exchange you report to depends on where you operate:
| Exchange | Authority | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Malaffi | Department of Health (DoH) | Abu Dhabi |
| NABIDH | Dubai Health Authority (DHA) | Dubai |
| Riayati | Ministry of Health and Prevention (MOHAP) | Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah |
Malaffi is Abu Dhabi’s Health Information Exchange (HIE), launched in 2019. Connection is mandatory for in-scope healthcare facilities, with non-compliance potentially affecting licence renewal and Daman claims. Facilities must also meet DoH’s data-sharing requirements, making EMR compatibility and vendor experience essential.
NABIDH is Dubai’s exchange. Each facility completes a readiness assessment and signs an onboarding agreement with DHA. Its EMR is then tested through NABIDH’s developer portal, and DHA assigns the facility a launch date. That makes your software vendor’s NABIDH experience just as important as your own paperwork.
Riayati is MOHAP’s National Unified Medical Record for the Northern Emirates. Vendors are classified by security level and go through a demo, a security review and a secure network connection before going live. MOHAP also asks for proof of Riayati registration when you renew a facility licence.
How your data reaches the exchange
Here’s the part many facilities don’t realise: HIEs don’t accept screenshots or PDFs. They expect structured messages, mostly in the HL7 v2 standard, sent automatically by your software the moment something happens:
- Patient registration and visits, when a patient is registered, admitted or discharged.
- Orders and results, when a test is ordered and when its result comes back.
- Prescriptions and dispensing, when a medicine is prescribed and when it’s handed over.
A successful HIE integration involves more than connectivity. Your EMR must exchange accurate, complete data in line with the relevant technical specifications and coding standards. For outpatient pharmacy workflows, this includes real-time OMP and RDS messaging and the use of DoH drug codes where required.
Accurate patient matching, valid clinical codes, and consistent data transmission are equally important. Standards such as ICD-10-CM for diagnoses, SNOMED CT for clinical terminology, CPT for procedures, and UAE drug codes for medicines help maintain data quality and support reliable healthcare information exchange. Ultimately, choosing the right EMR software is essential for regulatory compliance and healthcare interoperability.
Why 2026 raises the stakes
Abu Dhabi tightened the rules again this year. DoH Circular 10/2026 gave every healthcare facility six months to start sending Malaffi’s minimum required dataset, and a February 2026 circular requires clinicians to check Malaffi before ordering lab or radiology tests. For pharmacies, DoH’s drug supply standard says outpatient pharmacy software must work with Malaffi and the e-prescription platform. Your HIE connection is no longer a background task. It’s part of every working day.
Where your data lives matters too. Federal Law No. 2 of 2019 on the use of ICT in health fields requires health data to stay inside the UAE, with limited exceptions. So any software that sends your data to an HIE also needs to store it in the right place.
Four questions to ask your software vendor
Before you commit to a system, we’d encourage you to ask:
- Which exchanges are you live on today, and is your name on the regulator’s published list?
- Which message types do you send, and which coding standards do you use?
- Who handles onboarding, security assessments and network setup: you or us?
- Where is our patient data stored, and who can access it?
A vendor who answers with dates, list links and specifics is one you can count on when licence renewal comes around. A vendor who answers with “yes, all of them” deserves a second look.
How HSA keeps you connected
We’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to. We’ve connected our systems to the HIEs and have sent more than 1 million HL7 messages to date. We regularly monitor for any errors and rectify them as soon as we find them, before they become an issue for you.
Running a clinic? EzDx records each visit once, from appointment to claim, and reports to the exchange automatically, so your doctors can focus on patients instead of paperwork. Running a pharmacy? EzPOS sends prescribing and dispensing messages as part of the normal dispense, so your pharmacist never has to leave the till.
Want to see how simple HIE reporting can be? Book a demo and we’ll show you on a live system.