Abu Dhabi licenses healthy longevity medicine centres, and from the second half of 2026 it measures their outcomes. Every indicator is drawn from the EMR. Here is what your data needs to be able to do.
Abu Dhabi has done something no other health system has done at this scale. In 2024, its Department of Health (DoH) published a standard for licensing healthy longevity medicine centres, and licensed the first one later that year.2, 5 In May 2026, it went a step further and issued longevity-specific indicators under JAWDA, its healthcare quality programme.3
That second step changes the nature of the work. A longevity centre is no longer judged only on the services it offers, but on whether its clients actually improve. And every one of those measures comes from the same place: the centre's electronic medical record (EMR).
This article is for longevity centres in Abu Dhabi, clinics preparing to open one, longevity platforms entering the UAE, and the EMR vendors who support them. It sets out seven ways to make sure your data can carry the weight now being placed on it.
Figure 1. Every JAWDA longevity indicator depends on a structured baseline built from several sources.
The standard is clear about the foundations. A longevity centre must be certified under ADHICS, the Abu Dhabi Healthcare Information and Cyber Security Standard, and be "fully integrated with the unified electronic medical record system Malaffi" (section 3.2.3).1 It also expects the centre to use data from platforms such as Malaffi to design each client's personalised health journey.2
The standard also sets out what each client record must contain: identification and social data, evidence of consent, medical and lifestyle history, a health status assessment, and a summary of each episode with instructions (section 3.6.8.1). Centres must also achieve international accreditation within three years of the standard's publication (section 3.3.1). None of this is optional, and all of it assumes a well-structured record.
Appendix 1 of the standard lists what every client's assessment should include. The mandatory items are broad: medical, family and environmental history; psychosocial, cognitive, mood and sleep history; medication and supplement history; a lifestyle assessment; validated risk tools such as the Framingham Risk Score; vital signs and examination; body composition by bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA); and metabolic, renal, liver, hormonal and inflammatory blood panels, with urinalysis.1
In practice, a client's baseline rarely comes from one place. Some results come from the centre's own tests, some from a reference laboratory, and some from reports the client brings from another clinic or another country. If those results sit as PDFs alongside the record rather than in it, the baseline exists on paper but not in the data.
The JAWDA guidance defines four indicators. All use the EMR as their data source, are reported semi-annually through the JAWDA e-notification system, and count both improvement and maintenance of an optimal level.3
Figure 2. The four JAWDA longevity indicators, summarised from the DoH Healthy Longevity Medicine JAWDA Guidance V1 2026. Refer to the guidance for full definitions.
Two details matter for data teams. First, the body composition indicator is based on DEXA (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry), while the standard's mandatory assessment uses BIA, so centres need to plan which measurement their indicator data will come from. Second, JAWDA may cross-check submissions against claims data from the Shafafiya portal,3 so what the EMR says and what was billed need to agree.
Every indicator compares a follow-up result with a baseline taken inside a window: the highest, lowest or worst recorded value within the previous six or 12 months. That sounds simple until the data is examined. To select the right baseline, the system needs every result to carry its true test date, a consistent unit and a clear link to what was measured.
Take the metabolic indicator. It uses "gap closure": how far a client has moved from their baseline towards their individual target.
Figure 3. An illustrative gap-closure calculation for HbA1c. The arithmetic is simple; the hard part is trusting the inputs.
If one baseline HbA1c arrived as a percentage and another in millimoles per mole, or if a report date was recorded instead of the test date, the wrong value can be selected and the result misreported. Keeping the original value, unit and reference range alongside a standardised value, and mapping each result to medical coding standards, removes that risk.
Each indicator excludes certain clients, and the exclusions depend on what is in the record. For VO2 max, clients actively taking medicines that affect cardiorespiratory performance, such as beta-blockers, statins, diuretics or oral diabetes medicines, are excluded. For metabolic risk, clients with genetic dyslipidaemia, end-stage kidney disease or type 1 diabetes are excluded. For body composition, exclusions include pregnancy and medicines that significantly alter fat metabolism, such as high-dose corticosteroids.3
If medicines live in free text, and especially if they come from outside records under foreign names, a centre cannot apply these exclusions reliably. Clients who should be excluded are counted, and the centre's results look worse than its care deserves. Structured, coded medication and diagnosis lists, reviewed by a clinician, make exclusions accurate.
Longevity care relies heavily on devices, and the standard draws a clear line. It describes digital biomarkers such as activity, sleep, heart rate variability and gait as tools for continuous monitoring (section 2.4), and lists sleep assessment using FDA-approved wearable devices as an optional, recommended assessment. It does not recommend non-FDA-approved or unvalidated wearables for sleep or other physiological assessments outside a research protocol, and it asks centres to use "licensed, valid and reliable tools and technologies to objectively track progress" (section 3.6.6.2).1
Figure 4. Recording the source of every device reading keeps validated data usable and unvalidated data out of clinical decisions.
For data teams, this means every device reading should carry its source: the device, its approval status and how it reached the record. Without that, validated and unvalidated readings blur together, and neither can be relied on.
Longevity clients are often well travelled and well tested. Many arrive with years of results from other clinics and other countries, which is exactly the history a longevity baseline needs. We looked at how to capture and structure that history in 7 Ways UAE Clinics Can Stop Losing Expat Patients' Medical Histories.
Data also needs to flow outwards. The standard expects physicians to provide a summary to referring physicians and allied healthcare professionals with clear recommendations (section 3.6.7.1), and referrals to include medical history, medications and allergies (section 3.6.3.2).1 Structured records make both quick and accurate.
Finally, wherever this data is processed, the UAE's health data law applies. Under Federal Law No. 2 of 2019, health data related to services provided in the UAE may not, by default, be stored or processed outside the country unless an exemption applies.4 Before any tool or partner touches client data, ask where processing happens.
JAWDA is the Department of Health Abu Dhabi's healthcare quality programme. Providers report quality indicators through it, and in May 2026 it issued guidance with indicators specific to healthy longevity medicine.
The guidance takes effect from the second half of 2026, with semi-annual submission. The cognitive function indicator takes effect from the first half of 2027. Contact the JAWDA team at the Department of Health for submission deadlines.
VO2 max improvement or maintenance, metabolic risk improvement or maintenance (HbA1c, blood pressure and LDL cholesterol), body composition improvement or maintenance, and, from 2027, cognitive function improvement or maintenance.
All four indicators use the EMR as their data source, and submissions may be cross-checked against claims data from the Shafafiya portal.
The standard lists sleep assessment with FDA-approved wearable devices as optional, and does not recommend non-FDA-approved or unvalidated wearables for physiological assessment outside a research protocol.
Abu Dhabi has set a clear bar for longevity medicine: show that clients improve. Meeting that bar starts with data you can trust. There are two ways we can support you.
This article is for general information and is not legal, regulatory or clinical advice. Always refer to the current DoH documents.
Suhina Singh is a physician, the Founder and CEO of Jonda Health, and a health data strategist working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and clinical information systems.
