EHS Footstep Insights — AI appointment no-show predictor in UAE primary health care

Emirates Health Services (EHS), the UAE federal authority for primary health care in the Northern Emirates, manages over 140,000 patient visits monthly across its primary health centres and faced a 21% baseline appointment no-show rate causing resource waste, longer waits, and reduced access.

Reduce appointment no-shows and improve resource allocation through predictive risk alerts.

In October 2022, EHS deployed the 'Footstep Insights Solution', a random-forest classification model trained on 16 demographic, clinical, and appointment-specific features, categorising patients as high-risk (≥90%), medium-risk (80-89%), or low-risk (70-79%) of no-show; clinical staff receive proactive alerts to contact high-risk patients or reallocate slots via a real-time dashboard.

A peer-reviewed before-after study (JMIR Formative Research, January 2025) compared 67,429 pre-implementation appointments (Jul-Sep 2022) with 67,964 post-implementation appointments (Nov 2022-Jan 2023): no-show rates fell from 20.82% to 10.25% (a statistically significant 50.7% reduction; OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.42-0.45, P<.001); average wait time fell from 54 to 48.5 minutes, saving 387,394 patient-minutes over three months; the model achieved 86% accuracy.

The study received Dubai Research Ethics Committee approval and EHS has published an organisational AI Policy; limitations include the mitigation workflow operating outside the EHR system and the absence of long-term follow-up, financial-impact analysis, or demographic bias assessment.