Innovation For Impact: Rhazes AI CEO Dr. Zaid Al-Fagih On Building Tech For Resource-Strained Healthcare Systems

Located near Ein el Hilweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, Al Hamshari Hospital might seem like an unlikely place to see cutting-edge technology at work. Yet, it was here that, in August, the UK- and Qatar-based artificial intelligence (AI)-powered healthtech startup Rhazes AI launched a first-of-its-kind pilot that brings advanced clinical AI solutions into one of the most under-resourced medical environments in the region.

Palestinian refugees are typically excluded from the national healthcare system in Lebanon, and that leaves hospitals like Al Hamshari—which is run by the Palestine Red Crescent Society with limited international support—shouldering the demand of thousands of patients. Indeed, despite having just 80 beds, 56 doctors, and 31 nurses, Al Hamshari treats over 4,000 patients each month, with it known to perform more than 400 surgeries during times of crises. The region’s only dialysis unit is operated at this hospital, which recently absorbed an influx of Palestinian refugees from Gaza as well.

Rhazes AI’s three-month-long pilot, which runs until November, brings the company’s end-to-end AI clinical assistant—which functions both as an intelligent scribe and a decision-support tool—to support the staff at Al Hamshari. The controlled trial aims to assess how AI can ease the administrative load on frontline doctors working under extreme pressure, with its solution being tested in the hospital’s outpatient and emergency departments. “It’s an extremely resource-constrained setting, making it an ideal test for whether AI can make a difference where the need is greatest,” Rhazes AI founder and CEO Dr. Zaid Al-Fagih tells Inc. Arabia.

Dr. Al-Fagih, who was formerly a physician with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), founded Rhazes AI in 2023 alongside a team of technologists and healthcare experts. The platform, which is able to transcribe consultations in real time, support diagnostic reasoning, generate management plans, and automate clinical documentation, was built with the aim of reducing burnout, cutting errors, and improving patient care—issues that Dr. Al-Fagih had personally experienced.

“Health professionals are overwhelmed,” Dr. Al-Fagih says. “They treat dozens of patients each day while battling through mountains of paperwork. And the pressure only grows as populations age in countries like the UK, the US, and the UAE. The result is exhaustion, burnout, and mistakes that could have been prevented if doctors weren’t so overstretched. One in ten people die because of a diagnostic error, and for every hour your doctor spends with you, they spend two hours doing paperwork. These problems cost the world trillions of dollars. These are not just statistics; they reflect my personal lived experience as a doctor in the UK’s NHS. That’s what planted the seed for Rhazes AI.”

Having seen how AI was helping doctors achieve breakthroughs, accelerating vaccine discovery, and enabling earlier detection of cancer risk, Dr. Al-Fagih had a birds-eye view of where AI could make a difference at scale. Plus, thanks to his background in health systems, he also had an understanding of how the aforementioned issues play out at the policy and management levels. “Currently, AI mostly exists as one-off solutions, like AI scribes that solely transcribe conversations, and imaging tools with very specific medical use cases,” Dr. Al-Fagih notes. “So, we created an end-to-end agentic AI solution for clinicians that gives them specialist-level help with clinical decisions, and an intelligent scribe that can handle all their paperwork and admin tasks.”

Rhazes AI was launched in the UK in 2023, and it has since made inroads into the GCC as well, by setting up a base in Doha, Qatar. When asked about the name he has chosen for his enterprise, Dr. Al-Fagih replied, “Rhazes is the Latin version of al-Rāzī, the celebrated Persian polymath who is one of the most influential physicians in the Islamic world. He wrote the first detailed clinical description of measles, and his writings shaped medicine across continents. But he was more than a physician; he was a philosopher, scholar, and even an alchemist. We chose his name because it embodies innovation and versatility. Like al-Rāzī, we aspire to push the boundaries of medicine and create tools that support doctors in many different ways, ultimately reducing their workload and improving patient care.”

Keeping this goal in mind, it’s easy to see why Dr. Al-Fagih describes Rhazes AI’s impact on Al Hamshari to have been “transformative.” With its offerings freeing up time for clinicians in the hospital’s outpatient and emergency departments, Rhazes AI has helped its overstretched teams deliver better care under extreme pressure—but it’s not been without challenges. “The hospital only had one working computer for each floor, with much of the administration still on pen and paper,” Dr. Al-Fagih shares. “So, the first challenge was enabling doctors to create clinical notes quickly enough to keep pace with patient demand. Our software is designed to plug into any electronic health record system, but we also adapted it for mobile use, installing it directly on doctors’ personal smartphones. This flexibility allowed us to bypass infrastructure shortages and ensure the tools were accessible immediately.”

Doctors at Al Hamshari have thus responded positively to the Rhazes AI platform, with Dr. Al-Fagih saying that its adoption became straightforward once they realized how much of their time it saved. “We’re already seeing tangible outcomes for patients at Al Hamshari,” he adds. “The tools are slashing hundreds of hours per week, freeing up time for more face-to-face consultations. We’re tracking efficiency gains in processes like patient summaries, admission notes, billing codes, and extracting insights from records. We’re also gathering qualitative feedback through post-trial surveys to capture doctors’ perspectives on usability and impact. If successful, this model could extend to other refugee hospitals, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even national health systems.”

Key to helping Rhazes AI turn that vision into reality, Dr. Al-Fagih notes, has been securing the backing of institutional investors to help drive its growth. “We’re currently backed by venture capital funding from the Qatar Development Bank (QDB), the government’s Startup Qatar Investment Program, and other venture capital firms,” Dr. Al-Fagih shares. “We cleared a rigorous process to get this support, which has been instrumental to our growth. We’re especially grateful to Shaikha AlRomaihi [Head of Venture Capital Investment at QDB] and her team for their instrumental role in making it possible.”

Dr. Al-Fagih reveals that Rhazes AI is now focusing its next 12 months on targeting strong growth as well as on securing more strategic partnerships with healthcare systems and medical device distributors in Qatar and internationally. “Even mission-driven companies need sustainable business models,” he points out. “Profitability ensures we can grow steadily and reach more healthcare systems. What matters is that we remain anchored to the global challenge we set out to solve.” This ethos is especially evident when Dr. Al-Fagih talks about Rhazes AI’s rollout at Al Hamshari Hospital—as he put it, “Our work in the Ein el-Hilweh camp is neither glamorous nor highly profitable, but it is lifesaving.”

Looking to the future, Dr. Al-Fagih is hopeful that the Rhazes AI pilot at Al Hamshari will become a model for others in the healthcare ecosystem—particularly those facing similar challenges. “Whilst most AI evaluations focus on high-resource health environments, Al Hamshari offers a rare chance to measure impact in a low-resource, high-pressure setting,” he says. The long-term goal, though, is expansive. “Our vision is simple yet ambitious: to put Rhazes AI in the hands of every doctor, across every specialty, in every corner of the globe,” Dr. Al-Fagih says. “By guiding better decisions, saving time, and improving outcomes, we aim to support patients, clinicians, hospitals, and society at large.”

Pictured in the lead image is Rhazes AI co-founder and CEO Zaid Al-Fagih. All images are courtesy of Rhazes AI.

This article first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue online, click here.