Four Israeli hospitals have been listed in the rankings of Newsweek's The World's Best Smart Hospitals. Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer was ranked 13, Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center in Tel Aviv was ranked 84, Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem , Jerusalem was ranked 196 and Rabin (Beilinson Hospital) in Petah Tikva was ranked 215.
The ranking was compiled by Newsweek together with data firm Statista and is based on a survey in which physicians and digital health experts worldwide were asked to rank hospitals according to five criteria: robotic surgery, digital imaging, artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and electronic medicine. In-depth interviews on the matter were conducted with 13,000 experts before the data was interpreted.
On the subject of telehealth, Sheba Medical Center chief innovation officer Dr. Eyal Zimlichman was quoted in the introduction to the rankings as saying that, Shifting rehabilitation to the home means that patients can be released from the hospital sooner. Those capabilities will enable hospitals to shrink their costly physical facilities even while improving and expanding care."
Some might have expected that Israel, which sees itself as a world leader in digital health, would have had more representatives and higher ranking on the list but it seems that the competition is intense. The US, Germany, South Korea, France, Spain, the UK, Japan, Singapore, Italy, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands all had more representatives on the list than Israel, although in proportion to the size of its population Israel is well represented.
In its introduction to the rankings, Newsweek noted, "The pandemic put hospitals through the ultimate stress test. By forcing them to adapt to waves of Covid-19 patients, changing treatment protocols, faltering supply chains and a massive vaccine rollout, to name just a few of the challenges of the past year, the outbreak drove home the importance of advanced technology. The hospitals that best weathered the crisis were by and large the ones that were already open to integrating new technologies and taking advantage of data-driven opportunities as they become available."
Newsweek added, "In this respect, the pandemic has accelerated a trend that has been years in the making. Information technology and other tools that make hospitals "smarter" have already become a big differentiator in most health care markets. It's no wonder that the market for smart-hospital technology is expected to reach $35 billion in 2021 and balloon to $83 billion by 2026."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 10, 2021
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