Coping with a flood of victims from the Israel-Gaza war, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center Ichirov is ... [+]
In a wartime webinar, it was an unexpected message: invest in Israeli health technology today in order to reap the benefits tomorrow of innovations spurred by the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Perhaps the confident tone of Israeli health tech leaders shouldn’t have been surprising, since “chutzpah” was mentioned as a national character trait. According to a LinkedIn post by GistMD chief executive officer Dan Rolls, the webinar’s moderator, the gathering emerged as a result of a conversation with Andy David, a veteran tech investor and diplomat who’s director of the Innovation Task Force of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. David told Rolls he was seeing a burst of creative energy following the Oct. 7 outbreak of war.
“We’ve come together in unity to solve problems,” David told the foreign health tech customers and investors who were the webinar’s target audience. “It feels like we are in a Biblical-quality hackathon. The ‘day after’ [the war], all of this is not going to disappear.”
“This is the time to double down on Israel,” echoed Avi Hasson, CEO of Start-Up Nation Central and former chief scientist of the Ministry of Economy.
The stakes are large. High-tech has long been the fastest growing sector of Israel’s economy, according to Reuters, and now accounts for 14 percent of jobs and almost a fifth of gross domestic product. The sector also provided almost half of Israel’s 2022 exports, according to the Israel Innovation Authority, making it sensitive to outsiders’ perceptions of reliability. So far, there’s been widespread support, particularly from U.S. investors, but it’s not something Israelis take for granted.
Webinar participants repeatedly emphasized that tech firms have been resilient even in the face of a call-up of 360,000 reservists, disproportionately the young males tech companies often rely upon. The average tech company has lost 15 percent of its workforce (and some companies much more), said Hasson, but remaining workers are putting in extra hours to ensure customers aren’t affected.
“The demand for Israeli technological innovation hasn’t stopped,” said Hasson. “As long as we can deliver, business continues to go on.”
As one example, the Israeli branch of global pharmaceutical giant Sanofi is making sure medications remain available to patients locally and in other nations it serves despite employees being called up and despite most international airlines cancelling flights into and out of Israel.
“We are learning, we are agile, we are thinking outside the box,” declared Tina Meerry Melusyan, country lead for Sanofi Israel, before adding her voice to the pitch for more investment.
Although a semi-official hashtag addresses business continuity (#nomatterwhat), no one mentioned it. There were no PowerPoints, no harping on the webinar’s buzzword title of “transformative innovation in crisis,” and no politics. Investment in Israeli tech firms plunged 50 percent in the first half of 2023 to $168 billion, compared with $333 billion in the same period in 2022, according to data from the Viola Group. While much of that could be attributed to the global tech contraction, Israeli companies faced the added burden of fears over the rule of law due to the divisive battle over proposed judicial reforms.
Instead of sloganeering, there were two explicit messages and one strong implicit one, the latter conveyed by the credentials and tone of the participants: We, a group of experienced, no-nonsense realists, are telling you the health tech sector is coping just fine, and we believe the innovation spurred by war represents “the next economic renaissance of our country,” in David’s words.
Perhaps the firmest foundation for those fervent feelings was a brief presentation by Prof. Ronni Gamzu, former director general of the Ministry of Health, former coronavirus “czar,” and current CEO of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center Ichirov, the nation’s second-largest hospital.
Gamzu spoke about a flood of terror victims, “civilians and soldiers, and you need to follow and monitor hundreds of patients.” In response, the hospital quickly set up a new kind of monitoring system for trauma patients. And when the volume of those needing rehab and mental health services far exceeded available resources, “you have to reinvent the way you practice,” said Gamzu. That meant tele-rehab to engage patients and partnering with a start-up whose FDA-approved device uses digital brain biomarkers to guide clinicians’ response to the wartime wave of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Indeed, not long after the webinar, a survey concluded that one in three Israelis had symptoms consistent with PTSD, while among those directly affected by the brutal Hamas attacks, more than half suffered from PTSD symptoms such as sleep disorders and depression.
Unfortunately, Israel has long done a poor job of addressing PTSD. An article in Ha’aretz looking back 50 years to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as well as to the conflicts that followed, called Israel “an epicenter of trauma with a broken mental health system” run by a “belligerent bureaucracy.”
For me, that assessment had a personal echo. Ahead of a planned trip to Israel in mid-October (which, of course, never happened), I reached out to Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I was a student from 1973-74, to try to locate an Israeli friend with whom I’d lost contact. I remembered my friend most of all for our shared sense of humor, an unlikely bond between a Sephardic Jewish immigrant from Morocco and an Ashkenazi Jew from an American suburb. Instead, I was connected with my friend’s daughter. She told me that his service as a combat medic in the Sinai front had left him with a delayed case of PTSD. He eventually spent decades in and out of hospitals, before finally dying a premature death two years before his daughter’s wedding.
“Good days will come,”promises a newly popular song in Israel about emerging from depression. With a wave of PTSD now sweeping the country, perhaps the mental health innovations of “start-up nation” can begin to be rapidly disseminate even before war’s end in order to turn that promise into a reality. And maybe, in the process, be a model for nations like America that are also in dire need of better mental health services.
