Peter Schorsch
To provide cutting-edge health care, Florida’s foremost hospital is teaming up with an Israeli-based health care and medical innovation leader.
Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center, located outside of Tel Aviv, announced a partnership this week to boost their shared commitment to fast-tracking medical innovation and developing best practices.
“In everything we do, we aim to improve quality, expand access and achieve better outcomes for our patients. Sharing data, technologies, and innovations with the best systems around the world will help us achieve these goals faster,” said TGH President and CEO John Couris. “We recognized a real opportunity for us to contribute what we’ve learned in education, training, research and technology to our colleagues at Sheba Medical Center in Israel, and we see how their knowledge and expertise can directly benefit the patients we serve here in Florida. This partnership has great potential, and we’re already seeing the benefits of that.”
The collaboration is part of a three-year agreement between TGH and Sheba Medical, where the two hospitals intend to focus on education, training, innovation and research.
Other plans include sending delegations of health care professionals and researchers to share information and expertise.
“We are very excited about the prospect of working directly with Tampa General Hospital, one of America’s foremost academic medical facilities,” said Yoel Har-Even, director of Sheba International. “As hope has no boundaries, we believe that combining our collective medical knowledge and injecting our innovative technological know-how will be beneficial to everyone in the metro Tampa region, the state and internationally.”
Early in his administration, Gov. Ron DeSantis has prioritized Florida’s relationship with Israel. Within just six months of taking office, the Governor led a delegation to Israel to set up alliances in science, business and academia.
“Returning to Florida, we bring with us prospects for investment, high-wage jobs, water conservation, and innovative ideas to keep our schools and communities safe,” said DeSantis in May 2019, shortly after the visit.
The Israel trip led to a historic number of partnerships with Florida, including the new TGH partnership.
Appointed leaders in the DeSantis administration play a crucial role in strengthening the partnership between the Sunshine State and Israel. While COVID-19 has limited travel, Enterprise Florida, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, and the Florida-Israel Business Accelerator continue fostering these alliances, many of which emerged from that 2019 trade mission.
As one of the Newsweek’s Top 100 hospitals and a regular on the Nation’s Best Hospitals list from U.S. News & World Report, TGH is well on its way to becoming the safest and most innovative academic health system in America.
Sheba Medical Center is the largest hospital in Israel and ranks among the world’s top medical facilities. Sheba Medical Center emphasizes international collaborations and believes sharing medical knowledge and research with other institutions benefits people globally.
Both Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center share a passion for innovation and positive changes in health care, investing in technologies to improve the patient experience. Among the advances is using artificial intelligence to monitor care and regulate patient flow through each facility.
Additionally, both are developing innovation hubs to support startups and technology to find solutions for clinical care needs.
In 2020, Tampa General founded TGH Innoventures to use innovation to transform the future of health care, supporting early-stage startups and direct investments.
In 2019, Sheba Medical Center set up the ARC Center — “Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate” — a similar innovation hub for Israeli health care startups to draw upon expert physicians and hospital staff.
Over the past few months, hundreds of groundbreaking ideas and designs for technological models are helping identify patient deterioration from the coronavirus. Many of these advances originated at Sheba’s Corona Hub, found on the ARC Innovation Center campus.
Over the next few months, TGH and Sheba Medical will find the best ways to extend innovation and new developments into real-world applications to improve patients’ health locally, statewide and worldwide.
This is not the first time TGH and Sheba Medical Center have worked together. A joint venture in June 2020 produced a coronavirus-focused webinar to share experiences and insights on the emerging COVID-19 crisis. The success of that event developed into a greater partnership between the two.
