In November 2019, Sheba Medical Center officially launched its ARC (accelerate, redesign and collaborate) innovation center, the aim of which was to promote collaboration between the hospital and the Israeli and international biomed industry. Sheba has now found a way of scaling up the center and leveraging its innovation activity: the hospital has signed an agreement with consultancy Deloitte, which will learn the ARC model and implement it at hospitals around the world, under Sheba’s direction.
The ARC center consists of a startup campus, mainly in digital health. Two venture capital funds invest in companies connected to the hospital’s ecosystem, and a network of senior doctors around the world are partners in the activity. Every year, a conference is held at which these doctors discuss trends and challenges in medicine.
“No significant medical innovation activity can take place within the borders of one country,” Sheba Medical Center director general Prof. Yitshak Kreiss told “Globes”. “The network quickly attracted good doctors, and also aroused interest on the part of hospitals around the world.”
“We never imagined how many would approach us and say: Help us to set up similar activity ourselves,” says Prof. Eyal Zimlichman, who serves as Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba Medical Center, and who founded ARC. “The first activity was in Ottawa, after that in London and Bahrain, and now in New Jersey and Chicago, and we have also signed an agreement in Melbourne.”
When the activity started to capture too much management attention, as Prof. Kreiss puts it, the hospital decided partially to outsource it. “We held a tender among five leading global consultancies, and Deloitte won,” he says.
Together with Deloitte, Sheba is now compiling an “operational manual” for building innovation centers like ARC. Deloitte will set up the activity at the hospitals, with support from Sheba. Each implementation will bring a financial return. The hospital is not prepared to quote amounts, but Prof. Kreiss says that as far as he is concerned the main return is the spreading of the knowledge and the connections that will be generated. “In this way we are opening up the world to the Israeli startups that work with us,” says Prof. Zimlichman.
Asif Dhar, vice chair and US Life Sciences and Health Care Industry Leader for Deloitte LLP, who came to Israel for the signing of the agreement, said that for every hospital and health system that chooses to implement the model, a package will be devised that suits the size, current level of technological innovation, and resources of the hospital.
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Target: 40 centers a year
“We believe that innovation in health will develop exponentially, in order to prevent a blow-out of health budgets while at the same time giving every person appropriate treatment regardless of geographical location” adds Ilan Birnfeld, chairman and CEO at Deloitte Israel.
Kreiss says that there are currently seventeen requests from potential customers. “We want to reach 40 a year. That’s not out of the question: in India alone there are 30,000 hospitals, and the intention is to set up centers like these in health systems that are not classic hospitals as well.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on June 13, 2023.
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