ABSTRACT
Dubai, one of the seven emirates in the UAE, is heavily reliant on the tourism industry with many shopping malls, hotels, and tourist attractions, most of which are international franchised or licensed brands. The UAE imposes custom duties payable for the import and export of goods that may be applicable if any goods are supplied, and in January 2018 the UAE implemented value added tax at a rate of five percent with a limited number of items related to food, healthcare, and education being exempt.4 B. Competition Law The UAE has enacted competition law legislation (the Federal Law No. 4 of 2012 and the Executive Regulations (Council of Ministers' Resolution No. 37 of 2014) (UAE Competition Law)), which is broadly focused on anticompetitive practices, particularly in relation to restrictive agreements, abuse of a dominant position, and economic concentration. Furthermore, exclusive distribution agreements governed by the UAE Commercial Agencies Law (discussed below) are specifically excluded.5 In a franchising context, provisions commonly seen in a standard franchise agreement, such as price controls and mandatory purchasing of products from authorised suppliers, are unlikely to require the approval of the competition regulation committee. The UAE Commercial Agencies Law covers any arrangement where a foreign company is represented by an agent "for the distribution, sale, display or offer of a merchandise or service inside the state in return for a commission or profit" and does not make any distinction between agency, franchise, or distribution arrangements.10 This law only applies to contracts registered with the UAE Ministry of Economy (Ministry).11 For a franchise agreement to be registered with the Ministry as a "commercial agency agreement," the following criteria12 must be met: (1) the franchisee must be a UAE national or an entity incorporated in the UAE that is wholly owned by UAE nationals;and (2) the franchise agreement must be written in Arabic, notarised, and legalised.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: Broad adoption of digital pathology (DP) is still lacking, and examples for DP connecting diagnostic, research, and educational use cases are missing. We blueprint a holistic DP solution at a large academic medical center ubiquitously integrated into clinical workflows; researchapplications including molecular, genetic, and tissue databases; and educational processes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We built a vendor-agnostic, integrated viewer for reviewing, annotating, sharing, and quality assurance of digital slides in a clinical or research context. It is the first homegrown viewer cleared by New York State provisional approval in 2020 for primary diagnosis and remote sign-out during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. We further introduce an interconnected Honest Broker for BioInformatics Technology (HoBBIT) to systematically compile and share large-scale DP research datasets including anonymized images, redacted pathology reports, and clinical data of patients with consent. RESULTS: The solution has been operationally used over 3 years by 926 pathologists and researchers evaluating 288 903 digital slides. A total of 51% of these were reviewed within 1 month after scanning. Seamless integration of the viewer into 4 hospital systems clearly increases the adoption of DP. HoBBIT directly impacts the translation of knowledge in pathology into effective new health measures, including artificial intelligence-driven detection models for prostate cancer, basal cell carcinoma, and breast cancer metastases, developed and validated on thousands of cases. CONCLUSIONS: We highlight major challenges and lessons learned when going digital to provide orientation for other pathologists. Building interconnected solutions will not only increase adoption of DP, but also facilitate next-generation computational pathology at scale for enhanced cancer research.