During the 2018 IMIA General Assembly (GA) held on Oct 2018 in Sri Lanka, a new organization, the Middle East and North African Health Informatics Association (MENAHIA) was established as a regional non-governmental organization to promote Health Informatics in the region. Health Informatics activities in applications, education, and research have been growing in the Middle East and North African region for many years. Over the past year, health informatics initiatives within the region focused on the education sector and the workforce. The need to enhance the education delivery and methods is essential in promoting Health Informatics in the region as well as establishing master programs in many countries within the region.This paper provides an overview of the variety of initiatives that are occurring in the region and are endorsed by MENAHIA.

Diabetes is a salient issue and a significant health care concern for many nations. The forecast for the prevalence of diabetes is on the rise. Hence, building a prediction machine learning model to assist in the identification of diabetic patients is of great interest. This study aims to create a machine learning model that is capable of predicting diabetes with high performance. The following study used the BigML platform to train four machine learning algorithms, namely, Deepnet, Models (decision tree), Ensemble and Logistic Regression, on data sets collected from the Ministry of National Guard Hospital Affairs (MNGHA) in Saudi Arabia between the years of 2013 and 2015. The comparative evaluation criteria for the four algorithms examined included; Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F-measure and PhiCoefficient. Results show that the Deepnet algorithm achieved higher performance compared to other machine learning algorithms based on various evaluation matrices.

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