BGU has established a non-profit research center to promote and develop digital medicine in Israel in partnership with a group of Israeli entrepreneurs.
The CDI - Center of Digital Innovation will be located at the Gav Yam Advanced Technologies Park. Entrepreneurs involved include Ziv Ofek, founder of DBMotion that was recently sold to the US-based Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc; Sharon Sasportas, former Head of Operations for the Planning Department of the IDF; and Boaz Gur-Lavie, former CFO of Abbott Informatics Division. Allscripts is a strategic partner.
The non-profit center is expected to serve as a crossroads that will combine the cutting edge of scientific research in medicine, along with entrepreneurial ecosystem approach that characterizes Israel. The center will cooperate with strategic venture capital investors who wish to bring concepts to market, providing services to external entrepreneurs in need of infrastructure and. All of these will create a unique entrepreneurial and research ecosystem in the Negev’s capital Beer-Sheva.
BGU President and Chairman of CDI Prof. Rivka Carmi noted that, "Ben-Gurion University encourages ground-breaking scientific research. As part of the contribution to scientific development of science in Israel in general and the South in particular, we decided to establish the first innovation center of its kind that will maintain full synergy in the research and scientific fields with the university departments with the aim of assisting in the building of an entrepreneurial arena in the digital medicine field."
Above: Ziv Ofek with Prof. Rivka Carmi.
CEO Ziv Ofek explained that, "Israel has an abundance of brilliant minds and excellent entrepreneurs who until now met the needs of a wide range of spheres as varied as cyber, mobile telecommunications and more. Now it's digital medicine’s turn. We will provide the most advanced scientific infrastructure in the world for start-ups in this field, with mentors, services and connections to investors. This is a market with enormous global potential and we shall constitute a significant element in the development of this industry in Israel, too."
The International Advisory Committee includes leading experts in the field, including Charles N. ("Chip") Kahn III, President of the Federation of American Hospitals; Dr. David Bates, chosen by Modern Healthcare magazine one of the hundred most influential people in American medicine; Dr. Richard Siegrist, a serial entrepreneur in the field of digital medicine and others.
The initiative was created together with BGN Technologies Ltd. BGU's Technology Transfer Company and other local partners include Prof. Arie Moran, from the BGU Department of Physiology; Prof. Gideon Saar, head of cardiac surgery at Soroka University Medical Center and Dr. Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, senior lecturer at BGU’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for desert Research and a feminist activist.
