Stanford, Israel’s Rambam Hospital To Cooperate On Medical Innovation, AI Research

March 11, 2018 | Stanford Medicine and Israel’s Rambam Health Care Campus announced over the weekend that they are establishing a cooperation agreement to work together on the future of medicine. They announced four areas of cooperations including “medical innovation, research in collaboration with Big Data and Machine Learning, cutting-edge drug development and trauma and emergency preparedness.” The agreement was reached following a Stanford Medicine-Rambam Symposium on “Planning for the Next Generation” last week. The two institutions discussed opportunities for partnerships during the two-day event. The institutions noted the budget gap – “Rambam, a hospital with 1,000 beds and 130,000 visits to the emergency room annually with a budget of $400 million versus Stanford, a 600-bed hospital with 60,000 visits to its emergency room annually and a budget of $7 billion a year” – with Rambam Director Prof. Rafi Beyar saying that “despite the enormous gap, Israel ranks much higher than the US in the quality of medicine.” Speakers from both institutions discussed the difficult challenges of their respective health systems in maintaining equitable health care, closing gaps, coping with the challenges of tomorrow’s health needs, as well as the heavy burdens on health care systems, Rambam said in a statement. “During the conference, we discussed precise, personalized health issues and the issue of health in Israel, including the complex relations in Israel between its local diverse population and with its neighbors,” Prof. Beyar said.