Sheba Medical Center breaks new ground in AI-assisted healthcare

Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan has once again broken new ground by signing a strategic cooperation agreement with the US-based Artificial Intelligence giant OpenAI, giving Sheba medical teams access to the latest AI-powered healthcare models.

The ARC innovation arm of Sheba is taking the lead in this new project, making Sheba Medical Center the first hospital outside the United States to have access to OpenAI’s suite of specialized medical models.

This includes OpenAI for Healthcare and ChatGPT Health, which were launched in January and are currently being utilized at a handful of hospitals in the US.

These new models bring together a vast library of research, reinforced by real-time updates on surgical procedures, treatments, diagnostic tools, and medications, to give healthcare professionals the best possible information to prescribe treatment plans for their patients.

Sheba Medical Center will also present its own research and best practices to OpenAI's models so that colleagues in the U.S. can benefit from them as well. This includes administrative procedures, issues surrounding insurance coverage, and other related matters that are part of the process of delivering medical care to those who need it.

Healthcare professionals at Sheba expressed hope that this new cooperative arrangement will enable them to contribute to an ongoing revolution in medical science that AI has launched at hospitals, research universities and treatment centers all over the world.

"The healthcare system is one of the fields where artificial intelligence can have the greatest impact," OpenAI said in a statement. "We are excited to collaborate with Sheba to make advanced AI capabilities available to physicians, researchers, and healthcare professional teams."

Sheba Medical Center has long been at the cutting edge of medical treatments and has developed many tools, treatments, and procedures that have gone on to be adopted at other hospitals worldwide.

The ARC innovation center was established in 2019 by Sheba Director General Prof. Yitshak Kreiss and Chief Innovation Officer Eyal Zimlichman to take these innovative best practices to the next level and enable them to be shared more rapidly with the world through digital applications and the internet.

The center also partners with established medical organizations, companies and entrepreneurs who want to test their innovations in a real-world hospital environment.

The venture capital fund Triventures is also part of the team, helping those with scalable ideas find the funding they need to launch.

Examples of new AI applications that got their start at the center include technological solutions developed by startup AIDOC that allow physicians to quickly analyze medical imaging like X-rays and ultrasounds, as well as detect cardiac events and other issues.

Another development is the SmartER emergency room platform, which automatically documents and summarizes clinical examinations to give primary care physicians the most up-to-date information for making recommendations to their patients for further care or deciding that further treatments are unnecessary.

On the Sheba Medical Center’s website, users can get help from the “Sheba AI” tool, which answers questions, directs users to the page on the website they need to solve a particular problem or answer a particular question and gives the user any other assistance they need to make the most of their visit to the website.