BMJ Future Health
April 2026

Ahead of BMJ Future Health Middle East (now online on 13 May), we spoke to panellist Barry Solaiman, a lawyer helping to write Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health rulebook for healthcare AI. He explains why the law will not keep up with advances of AI in medicine, and what that means for doctors when things go wrong.

Plus: what the Gulf is doing that the UK and US are not. 

From the editor's desk

What to read to stay up to date with medicine and AI. 

Community Spotlight:

"The world can learn from Qatar"

Barry Solaiman, raised in northeast England, moved to Doha in 2017, following the completion of a law PhD from the University of Cambridge, to help develop a new law school. 

He went on to become associate dean and associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) College of Law, which now runs four programmes. “We achieved it,” he said. He has since left HBKU and is now affiliated with Northwestern University in Qatar. The Durham accent has not shifted. 

Solaiman initially saw his role in the region as a bridge: “Someone who could be helpful to both sides, have a conversation, open doors, connect.” A decade on, that bridge runs in a direction he did not expect. “Other people might come in and think [only], what can the world teach Qatar,” he told BMJ Future Health. “But, actually, there's a lot the world can learn from Qatar, and its neighbours, Saudi [Saudi Arabia] and UAE [the United Arab Emirates].” 

Solaiman has spent years working with Qatar's hospitals, regulators, and academic collaborators. Chief among the latter is Mohammed Ghaly, professor of Islam and biomedical ethics at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and academic director of its Research Centre for Islamic Legislation and Ethics. Ghaly’s research applies Islamic ethics to questions in biomedicine and AI, and he is a co-author on Solaiman's recent paper in npj Digital Medicine. "It's a perspective I integrate into how I think about governing AI in healthcare," Solaiman said. 

That work feeds a question Solaiman thinks modern medicine has not answered. A doctor uses an AI tool. It misses something. A patient is harmed. Who is responsible? Today, in most healthcare systems, the answer is the doctor and the employing hospital. Solaiman thinks that will not hold. 

“If the doctor is required to use AI by their employer, or the AI itself sets the standard of care, we need to change how laws work,” Solaiman said. “Tort law [which governs civil claims for harm, including medical negligence] doesn’t deal with this yet.” 

In npj Digital Medicine, Solaiman and his co-authors set out what they call a "true lifecycle approach" to AI governance. The idea is that law and ethics should be baked in from the moment an algorithm is designed, not bolted on after it reaches a clinic. 

The paper points to related developments emerging across the Gulf. Saudi Arabia has folded AI requirements into its medical device regulations. Abu Dhabi and Dubai have issued AI policies with the force of law. No equivalent framework exists yet in the UK or US, though the paper acknowledges that the Gulf approach works in part because these are more centralised systems of governance.

Solaiman has put elements of the framework into practice. For example, he led a grant developing Qatar's guidelines for healthcare AI research, with the Ministry of Public Health as official advisors.

The reason it matters to him is simple. “When we’re seeking care, we’re in a very vulnerable state. The last thing we want to worry about is getting harmed by a machine we don’t understand, and not knowing who to turn to.” 

Solaiman is speaking at BMJ Future Health Middle East (virtual) on 13 May on the panel "AI in healthcare: a regional discussion" here at 12:30 pm (BST), alongside Kalthoom Al Blooshi (Emirates Health Service, UAE), Lincoln Gombedza (NHS, UK), Asra Ahmed (Diabesties, Saudi Arabia), and Dalal Al Shamari (PHCC, Qatar).

Competing interests: Adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University in Qatar; affiliate at Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. He is a member of the working group on the Regulatory Considerations of AI in Health at the WHO, and a speaker at BMJ Future Health Middle East 2026.

Open call for papers

If you’re working on a relevant project, we want to hear from you. Explore our calls for papers. 

Do you know a healthcare professional or researcher making a difference in healthcare right now?
If so, we want to hear from them. Submit your questions and topic suggestions.

Loading