Not every journey into healthcare starts with a stethoscope. For Amanda Gravitis, it began with a passion for building strong teams, solving problems, and making a real difference. Today, she’s the CEO of Smart Salem, a company that’s changing the way people get medical tests in the UAE. Under Amanda’s leadership, Smart Salem has turned a process that used to take a long time into something fast and easy, thanks to technology like robots and smart computers. In this interview, Amanda shares her journey, the idea behind Smart Salem, and what it’s like to lead a company that’s changing healthcare for the better.
Amanda believes that the future of healthcare isn’t just about fixing problems but about helping people stay healthy in the first place. She’s building a company that makes healthcare faster, easier, and more personal for everyone. Her story is one of learning, adapting, and making a positive impact on the world around her.
Let’s delve into the details below!
Can you share a bit about your journey and what inspired you to take on the role of CEO at Smart Salem?
I didn’t start out in healthcare. I’ve had a very unique collection of experiences, and I do feel very proud about where I am today. My background is in consulting and industry, but my passion is about building things (including teams) and creating a positive impact on society. I moved to Dubai from Australia to join PwC in 2021, became COO at Smart Salem in 2022, and in 2023 was promoted to CEO.
A key thing is that I’ve been open to all of these opportunities.
How is Smart Salem revolutionizing the healthcare and medical testing sector in the UAE? What sets it apart from traditional medical screening centers?
In the UAE all expatriates are required to regularly undergo a medical test as part of the process to obtain and renew their residency. In most cases this means finding a center near you, queuing for quite some time, and receiving results days later. Smart Salem is the only premium visa medical test provider in the UAE offering a fully digital experience for customers, with three convenient locations, results issued within 30 minutes (before you even arrive home or back to the office), valet parking, and robots to welcome and assist you during your visit (some even make your coffee)! The time taken to complete your test in the center is less than 10 minutes.
We also offer a range of cutting-edge preventative health and wellness screenings, including general health checks, intolerance tests, and even gut microbiome analysis and Smart DNA tests for nutrition, aging, and hair and skin health that are powered and made possible by advanced AI.
Ultimately, we want to empower people to make more informed choices earlier, understand their predispositions, prevent illnesses and treatment, and improve their quality of life and physical performance.
Technology is reshaping healthcare. How is Smart Salem leveraging AI and automation to enhance efficiency and improve patient experiences?
AI is playing a significant role in transforming most industries, including healthcare. For me, the most exciting thing about it is that it makes comprehensive and proactive health screening so much more accessible and relevant for everyone.
Advanced AI has given us the ability to process enormous volumes of data in a fraction of the time – such as the trillions of micro-organisms in the gut microbiome or the billions of nucleotides in DNA, making this kind of comprehensive analysis almost universally accessible, including from a cost perspective. It has opened the door for significantly improved outcomes for patients suffering from common ailments such as gut health issues, hair loss and acne. Being able to compare large data sets also means we can make much more meaningful comparisons and is why we are able to offer patients highly personalized recommendations.
With the UAE positioning itself as a global hub for healthcare innovation, how do you see Smart Salem evolving in the coming years? Any expansion or new initiatives in the pipeline?
This is a fast-paced industry, and we want to be one step ahead, always, so we are constantly exploring and testing new ideas and technologies. We do have some exciting new services planned, but you’ll have to wait and see.
What are some of the biggest challenges in leading a healthcare-tech company in the UAE, and how do you navigate them?
The challenges we have experienced have mostly come from the speed at which we have scaled. Since I joined, we have expanded from one to three centers – and this happened in a period of six months – and grown from 20 employees to ~120 now.
Scaling up operations, systems and processes at this speed while maintaining quality of the service and consistency across multiple sites was a real challenge, but we built an incredible team of people who were bought into the vision and understood that not everything was going to be perfect all of the time, and together we made it happen.
As a leader in the healthcare space, what principles guide your leadership style, and how do you foster innovation within your team?
We have just launched our culture book, with a very clear purpose, vision and values which guide us in all of our actions, from the leadership team through to our customer happiness officers who greet our customers.
Our purpose, the reason we exist, is to empower people and communities to enjoy better, healthier and longer lives and our vision is to bring the future of preventative health and wellness to the people and communities of the UAE. We aspire to challenge the status quo and really drive the transformation from healthcare to health and to do that we have to be ahead of the game, innovative, transformative and willing to take risks. One of our core values is ‘one step ahead,’ which embodies this approach and ensures that everyone acts with an innovative mindset every day.
What major trends do you foresee shaping the future of healthcare and medical diagnostics in the UAE and beyond?
AI will have the biggest transformative impact on healthcare both here in the UAE and globally in coming years. It will become a fully integrated element of existing health systems across the whole clinical journey, universalizing access and enhancing diagnostic speed, accuracy and insights. It will enable earlier identification of currently complex cases and conditions and drastically optimise medical imaging process speeds. This will mean we can implement more effective interventions earlier, leading to greatly improved outcomes across multiple core disease processes. It will also dramatically improve the extent to which testing and treatment can be personalized.
What advice would you give to emerging entrepreneurs and professionals looking to make an impact in the healthcare and tech industries?
The best advice I can give is to take up every opportunity – say yes alot because you never know where something might lead you, what doors might open.
Also, don’t get too hung up on getting everything right – you will make mistakes, but what’s most important is that you learn fast when things don’t go as planned and adapt. Making any decision is better than making no decision.
Finally, hire good people who believe in your purpose and align with your values – this is crucial! This is important in any industry but even more so in healthcare.
