About
A planning tool for a question no one was answering.
Sehatlas is developed independently by a student researcher, applying open geospatial data to a gap in how Saudi Arabia measures healthcare access.
Mission
To give health planners, researchers, and policymakers in Saudi Arabia a free, open, and reproducible way to see where healthcare access and population vulnerability overlap — so that scarce siting and outreach resources go to the communities that need them most, not just the ones a raw facility count makes visible.
The problem
Saudi Arabia publishes how many hospitals and health centres exist in each of its 13 administrative regions — 516 hospitals and 5,779 primary healthcare centres per the MOH Statistical Yearbook 2024, against a 2022 census population of 32,175,224. But a facility count divided by an administrative boundary answers none of the questions a planner faces.
It does not say how far anyone actually travels to reach care, whether the nearest facility is already saturated by everyone else competing for it, or whether the populations facing the longest journeys are the ones least able to make them. A wealthy household drives ninety minutes to a hospital without difficulty; a poor household experiences the same ninety minutes as a barrier that delays treatment until it becomes an emergency.
On every existing measure, those two places look identical. No published tool currently distinguishes them anywhere in the Kingdom, and no small-area socioeconomic vulnerability index exists for Saudi Arabia at all.
Founder
Hamad
Sixth-year medical student, King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (KSAU-HS), Riyadh
[Founder bio — to be supplied. Two to four sentences on background, research interests, and why this platform.]
Institutional context
Sehatlas is developed independently by a student researcher at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (KSAU-HS), with research access through the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs (MNGHA) for later phases. KSAU-HS and MNGHA are named here as affiliations and, in later phases, potential data-access routes — not as endorsers, funders, owners, or partners of this platform.
King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (KSAU-HS), Riyadh