NABIDH Guide Part 1: What Is NABIDH and How Pabau Connects to It

If your clinic operates in Dubai, you will have heard of NABIDH — and if you are on Pabau, you can connect to it directly from your account. This guide explains what NABIDH is, what the Pabau integration sends, and what you need before you switch it on. The rest of the series walks through setup, mapping, event selection and monitoring step by step.

This article is part of the NABIDH guide series:

• Part 1: What is NABIDH and how Pabau connects to it (you are here)
• Part 2: Connect Pabau to NABIDH
• Part 3: Map your data for NABIDH
• Part 4: Choose which events are sent to NABIDH
• Part 5: Test, monitor and troubleshoot NABIDH deliveries

What is NABIDH?

NABIDH (short for Network & Analysis Backbone for Integrated Dubai Health; the acronym also spells the Arabic word for "pulse") is the Dubai Health Authority's health information exchange platform. It brings the records that Dubai's healthcare facilities hold about a patient together into one unified medical record, so that any treating clinician in the emirate can see an up-to-date history — allergies, diagnoses, medications, lab results and visits — regardless of which facility captured them.

The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) requires licensed healthcare facilities operating in Dubai to share patient health information with NABIDH. Connecting your practice management system is therefore not just good practice — it is part of operating a compliant facility in Dubai.

How Pabau connects to NABIDH

Pabau includes a native NABIDH connector as part of its Data Sync engine. Once connected:

• Data flows one way, from Pabau to NABIDH. Pabau is the source of truth — nothing in your Pabau account is changed by NABIDH.
• Messages are sent in real time. When something happens in Pabau (a patient is registered, a visit is checked in, a prescription is issued), the matching message is queued and delivered immediately — there is no overnight batch.
• Messages use the DHA's required format. Every message is an HL7 v2.5.1 message built to the DHA's NABIDH Inbound HL7 v2.5.1 specification, and Pabau runs an automatic conformance audit against that specification on every delivery, so you can see exactly what was sent and how it maps to the spec.

The connector lives in the Data Hub: go to Data Hub > Data Sync, where NABIDH appears alongside Pabau's other data sync connectors. Accounts based in the UAE also get a NABIDH shortcut button in the top navigation bar.

What can Pabau send to NABIDH?

The integration covers the full patient journey. Each Pabau event maps to a specific HL7 message type:

• Patient demographics — new registrations (ADT^A28), updates (ADT^A31), and optionally deletions (ADT^A29) and record merges (ADT^A40).
• Visits — appointment check-in (ADT^A04), visit detail updates (ADT^A08), discharge (ADT^A03), optional pre-admit on booking (ADT^A05) and cancellation after check-in (ADT^A11).
• Allergies — the patient's active allergy list (ADT^A31 with AL1 segments).
• Problems / diagnoses — the patient's problem list (PPR^PC1).
• Prescriptions — issued prescriptions (RDE^O11), with drugs resolved against the Dubai Drug Code (DDC) registry.
• Lab results — final and corrected results (ORU^R01).
• Documents & letters — EMR letters and PDFs (MDM^T02).
• Vaccinations (VXU^V04) — coming soon.

You choose exactly which of these are active — each event type is a separate toggle. Out of the box only patient registrations and updates are switched on; everything else is opt-in. Part 4 of this series covers each event in detail.

What you need before you start

The connection details come from your DHA NABIDH onboarding. Before setting up in Pabau, have the following to hand:

• EMR code — the code NABIDH assigned to identify your system.
• Sheryan facility ID — your facility's 7-digit DHA Sheryan licence number.
• Application key — the key NABIDH issued for authenticating your messages.
• Endpoint URL — the NABIDH URL your messages are delivered to (test and production endpoints are separate).

Inside Pabau you will also complete a small amount of one-off mapping so your data lands in the right HL7 fields — Emirates ID and a few other patient fields, a NABIDH specialty on each bookable service, and each practitioner's 8-digit Sheryan licence number. Part 3 walks through all of it.