How I Invest with David Weisburd - E23: How Israel’s Largest Hospital Delivers Care to Palestinians through “Peace Through Health"

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Brian Abrahams, CEO of American Friends of Sheba Medical Center, sits down with David Weisburd to discuss its “Peace through Health Initiative” and how the hospital has been helping Israeli and Palestinian citizens during the current conflict.

So at any given time, 20% of our children's hospital are kids from the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and 50% of pediatric cardiology patients are Gaza and West Bank. When the war broke out on October 7th, we had 61 patients from Gaza and the West Bank and 68 family members in-house. Brian, do you want to give a one minute background on yourself and then we could start going in, but maybe you could give me a little bit on yourself at a high level. I'm the CEO of the American Friends of Sheba Medical Center. We're the U.S. support organization that raises money for the largest medical center in the Middle East. I spent 15 years with APAC in senior management roles. I worked for the National Federation System, and I also did some private sector work. Thank you, Brian.

Reese, can you give a quick background on yourself? Sure, my name's Reese Powell. I spent over 40 years in healthcare in the US as well as in Europe. I spent 25 years with Fresenius Medical Care. 10 of those was chairman and CEO of the global company. There are some parallels in dialysis to what we see in women's health, particularly pregnancy, pregnant mothers.

And there is a health equity issue in this world. And when I retired, I decided I wanted to focus on nothing but health care equity and try to make the world right for everybody, no matter what their color, origin or creed is. So let's get into it. Brian, let's start with, tell me about, obviously, October 7th, one of the darkest days, really, in modern Jewish history, the largest murder of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. So tell me a little bit about Sheba Hospital, as I mentioned, the largest hospital system in the Middle East and in Israel, of course. So tell me a little bit about what role Sheba Hospital was played in helping civilians on October 7th. Thank you, David, because I don't think my face is that interesting to look at.

I wanted to just I pulled a couple visuals that i'd like to uh to share so just a quick history sheba was founded by david manguru in 1948 the u.s army had built a field hospital in british mandatory palestine during world war ii that they wound up never using and so after the state was declared in 1948 david bangurian said this will be our national hospital for military wounded and there are a lot of veterans from the war that needed rehabilitation so that was kind of woven into Sheba's DNA from the start today Sheba is the largest medical center not only in Israel but in the entire Middle East the only single medical center in the United States that's bigger is the

Mayo Clinic that on a campus half the size of the country of Monaco and they become a global powerhouse in many ways. They were ranked by Newsweek Magazine five years in a row as one of the top hospitals in the world. And you can see there's other verticals in which they're named one of the top hospitals in the world. So today they have 10,000 professionals. There's actually six different hospitals within the Sheba campus, 1,900 MDs, PhDs, 1, 1900 beds. They deliver 11,000 babies per year, 1.9 million clinical visits. About 20% of the Israeli population

in the course of a year will be treated at Sheba Medical Center. 25,000 cars a day come through their front gates. They have many of Israel's national centers. They're also a big research powerhouse. A third of the all clinical trials in Israel take place there. And they're the seventh most published medical institution in the world they also are one of the pioneers others have

done it now but they were one of the pioneers in saying let's turn a medical center into a giant medtech incubator israel as some of you or all of you may know is a very innovative tech focused company country so they said okay we're going to foster innovation by our own doctors which is uh something we may touch on later here. And we're also going to open our doors. Anyone who has a medical idea from digital to a piece of hardware, come inside. We'll give you the biggest test bed in the world and coaching and funding, et cetera. So it's a whole separate topic, but we're a big generator of medical technology.

Sheba also does a lot of humanitarian missions around the world. However good your local hospital is, ask how many missions they take, international humanitarian missions. And we basically visited every continent in the world, except for North America. We've had four or five missions just to Africa this year. We sent during, when the Ukraine war broke out,

Israel sent its first civilian field hospital into a war zone to Ukraine, and they had Sheba Medical Center run it, where we actually began really doing a lot of field testing of remote care work that started before COVID. Brian, maybe you could expand a little bit. You have a very interesting mandate, which is peace through help. Can you tell me a little bit of what that means? Awesome question, David. So obviously, Israel lives in one of the more challenging neighborhoods in the world.

They are very conscious of their place within the Middle East and within the larger world. So Sheba wove into its kind of DNA the idea of peace through health. And the director general said, when you save the life of someone's child. So Sheba is very forward leaning. We treat, obviously, 25% of our staff is Arab-Israeli. Only 20% of Israel is Arab-Israeli. We also treat patients in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This was a boy that was badly burned in Gaza with his mother. And this was actually in our underground pediatric ICU, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. During a previous round of rockets from

Gaza, here was a boy from Gaza that was being helped. We fostered, the Palestinian Authority, we fostered a pediatric oncology conference and we brought in doctors from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and our own to talk and idea share. We created a medtech incubator in an Arab village called Kfar Qasim in northern Israel to foster medtech innovation in the Arab sector in Israel. And Shiba has been very involved in the Abraham Accords. You know, the first plane to land in any of these countries is the foreign minister to sign the accord. The second plane is Shiba Medical Center, because a lot of these countries want to ask us to either Shiba doctors, get their own doctors trained, med tech, etc. So at any given time, 20% of our children's hospital are kids from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. and 50% of pediatric cardiology patients are Gaza and

West Bank. When the war broke out on October 7th, we had 61 patients from Gaza and the West Bank and 68 family members in-house. One thing to note, and I think one of the wars that we're really fighting is the war of information, a war of propaganda. And one thing that is clear to me is that not only has Shiva been utilizing and leveraging this peace through health initiative for many years, has been in six different continents and has been doing these health missions. And for there to be any kind of peace and lasting peace, there needs to be a two-sided solution. And the framework on that has to be both economic, but also through initiatives like Shiba and through hospitals and healthcare. And I think it's very promising to see that Shiba is leading the way there.

And I think it's a story that needs to be told much more. And that's one of the reasons that we're having this call. It's not just to raise money. Everybody tries to raise money, but it's to really change the narrative and really fight the propaganda and the information wars that are going on today through many different social media platforms. So we asked about 10-7. So what happened exactly on 10-7 and how did Shiba react?

Shiba obviously does a lot of drilling. So they declared a mass casualty event on 10 7 when they immediately saw the outlines of what was happening and they run throughout the year israel sheba runs drills for what to do in the situation so immediately casually started flooding in again we're the largest medical center in israel so our er began to be flooded then the choppers started landing later in the day. One of the stories that's not told about 10-7, because the initial troops were so pinned down for so long, they couldn't evacuate casualties. So tourniquets were applied that needed to be removed, and they didn't get removed in

the right time window. So soldiers lost limbs who otherwise would have been saved because they couldn't get choppers in. But then Sheba has two helipads, not one, but we have two helipads couldn't get choppers in but then sheba has two helipads not one but we have two helipads so the choppers began landing by the way all these photos are from the current conflict um began landing with the the serious casualties um which israelis poured in to line up to donate blood in fact this is the uh the acting we now have an ambassador in israel america does but we didn't at the time this was the charge de affairs who came to donate blood at sheba and i want to pause to linger on this image for a moment german germany is a military delegation in israel military attaches think about german soldiers coming in

to give blood to save jewish lives but among the things we had to do is our pediatric intensive care and nick you are on high floors in the hospital, which are not safe from rockets. So during COVID, we repurposed an underground parking garage and ran medical gases and all sorts of electricity and things in. So this underground garage could turn into an ICU. So we immediately moved, these are NICU babies being moved. Imagine, think about how fragile a child is in the NICU. They're being moved here into an underground parking garage so that they could be safe from rocket fire. We also sent home, and we're going to maybe talk a little bit more about this, we began sending home high-risk pregnancies from the hospital with remote

monitoring equipment so that they can have their pregnancy monitored. Normally, these are patients that would be in the hospital, but we've sent a good handful of them home to be monitored from home. And they get to be with their kids, their own safe room in their own home, but they're being monitored with remote equipment. So maybe we could double click on that. We have three board members. The board of NUVO is a very incredibly innovative, but also important medical device. Maybe you could talk about your partnership and how that was able to help defray some of the suffering and some of the casualties and issues going on during time. Sure. So we have better minds than me on Nuvo, but Dr. Abid Sur, so I spoke earlier about

entrepreneurial physicians. So Abid Sur is in charge of our OB-GYN, and he's a brilliant guy. And he had been working on the development of, he's worked on a number of things, but working on the development of this device, which put us in a position to, you know, what happened was overnight, we needed to double ICU capacity and triple rehab beds overnight. Now think about any hospital, think about your own local hospital in the middle of America having to do that. Think about a hospital under wartime conditions and rockets are landing so one of the things you have to do is you have to send patients home so we sent home all geriatric rehab patients we sent home anyone that didn't have an acute issue in the hospital and we sent home high-risk pregnancies and because avi had

had this background and had the nouveau device we were allowed to send these patients home to be to be safely remote monitored from Sheba. And then the event something comes up, they can then be brought back quickly to the hospital. Larry's on the board of Nuvo. And Nuvo was kind enough to do a pretty significant donation of devices to the hospital. Tell me about your relationship with Sheba. And then tell me you also have a very personal story on 10 7 and maybe tell us what what was going on the ground in your family and in Israel Larry Klein by the way of quick background I live in Israel I moved to Israel 20 years ago from the US after founding

and operating uh various companies in the US uh that I founded uh but the story of Shiba is actually personal on a number of levels. And I'll explain it in two different parallel worlds. The first world is the one that Brian had just mentioned earlier on when he said there was helicopters that brought patients in to the Shiba hospital. One of those patients was my nephew. My nephew, and very specifically, what Brian mentioned about the tourniquet issue, he is actually living through that very specific care that is being administered by Sheba Hospital. He was one of the first two,

if you read about it and everyone did, about the first two bases that were attacked by the uh Hamas's elite units uh one of the bases was completely uh unfortunately uh all members of that base were uh killed in that attack uh the other base was the one that my nephew was in there were definitely unfortunately uh a few of the soldiers that were killed, but there were many heroes, one of them being my nephew, who personally was able to facilitate the safe navigation of soldiers into a safe bunker, and then ultimately to help navigate those soldiers to health care facilities all under combat, in a combat zone.

He was injured. He was shot. He did apply tourniquet. And exactly as Brian said, the issue for him was that the tourniquet was on for too long before he was able to get to hospital care. But he ultimately did make it to hospital care. He's now recovering in one of those very units that Brian mentioned that was evacuated for the use for injured soldiers. And he is recovering. He's doing very well. He's hopefully going to get the use of his arm back. And they're providing truly the top level of care.

And of course, we visit him and we bring him a lot of his arm back and they're providing truly the top level of care. And of course we visit him and we bring him a lot of his favorite foods. Larry, I don't want to make you relive that day, but I think, you know, if you, if you Google Shlomo, Shlomo Klein, it's a, it's a fascinating story. It's one of these real life heroes. And do you talk a little bit about what he did on that day I can I'll I'll share really only what's in public information because uh personally he's told us in graphic detail what happened but uh he was uh he was in charge of what's called the magav the magav is basically uh is the loudest automatic, large fire artillery that an individual can carry. And they were surrounded. They were basically overrun by the group of terrorists,

and they were out to kill and uh i actually did see videos uh of uh barbaric savage videos but what he did was he uh he actually set his gun down and he sprayed across the horizon to give his comrades the ability to find a safe space inside what is essentially a bunker, which is the lunchroom. In that, they were literally throwing grenades in every, he said, about every five minutes they would throw a grenade in and bullets flying. And they had to hold off that entire unit for about six hours before Shiet was able to come in and rescue them from outside.

In that six hours uh there were casualties including a soldier that was literally sitting uh right next to him and uh he himself was uh shot uh but they held off uh that unit and it's a it's a phenomenal story it will be published I'm sure they're going to do a video on it uh That was only half the hero side of the story. And it's not just him. It's everyone and so many more like him. But afterwards, when Shayetet came, an interesting anecdote, they didn't know if Shayetet was another terrorist group or the Israeli army.

And the only way they would be able to identify, remember, they're under live attack from one side. And from the other side, they're being told that come on out, come on out. And their use of the code is the other side, the Shiyetet, just scream out Shema Yisrael, and they open the door. That was their code. No plan, just Shema Yisrael, open the door. They left. They were still under combat zone and uh at that point uh there were a number of casualties including uh my nephew uh and he basically his mother is a doctor and so he understood the uh criticality even though he

had a tourniquet on himself and others had also uh tourniquets or whatever other injuries they were attending to uh but he basically got on the microphone and he basically said, get a helicopter. And now they did not necessarily consider them critical injuries, but he understood the criticality of those injuries. And his second stage was to help navigate his comrades to a hospital or health care. So truly an amazing story, but one of many, many, many amazing stories. I think what makes it even more amazing is that after seeing that carnage,

everybody on this call has seen different variations of it, but the sheer brutality and the evil, you mentioned about not knowing whether it was Hamas fighters or the Israeli troops. One of the horrific things that Hamas fighters did that is one of the most unconscionable things I've ever heard is they went through the villages and screamed Ima, which is mother in Hebrew, to get the children to come out to slaughter them. It's hard to even repeat. But I think it is important to state the facts as they are, and to make sure that the world hears about what went on, and who the good guys and

who the bad guys are. I know we don't live in an overly simplified world. But ultimately, there is good and there is evil in this world. And I think that's something that people are not, for whatever reason, able to comprehend. This week's AdSpace is proudly donated to Friends of Sheba Hospital. Sheba Hospital is the largest hospital in the Middle East, servicing both Israeli and Palestinian patients

from both Gaza and the West Bank, which comprises up to 50% of all patients and several hospital wards. We ask that you consider making a one-time donation to Friends of Sheba Hospital via the link below or by visiting www.standwithsheba.com. That's www.standwithsheba.com. This donation is tax deductible and will allow Sheba to continue spreading the message

of peace through health and peace in the Middle East. We thank you for your support. I think it's important we continue the story. Thank you, Larry. So back to Brian. Whenever you have an attack like that and these horrific things that you see and that happened, there's also an aftermath of that. And I know that Sheba Hospital is helping with the national trauma. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. So one of the things that's going to come, and I also have some shots regarding the rehab

that's going to be needed if you'd like to see that. But we're basically witnessing the traumatization of an entire country almost. We talk about six degrees of separation in Western society. That's been studied and validated. Israel's actually been studied, and it's under two degrees. It's one to two degrees of separation, meaning, you know, think about yourself. If you hear on the radio there's a car accident on the highway, what are the odds you're going to know the person? In Israel, if you don't know the person, you know someone who knows them. That's literally how close and interwoven the country is.

So you have a tremendous amount of traumatization, the people, the kids from the music festival who are from all over the country and their families, anybody who's lost someone and their families, anyone who was injured and their families and neighbors, and all the people running from rocket fire for years. So the mental health challenge here is huge. And the trauma counselors tell us that you actually want to treat trauma before it becomes PTSD PTSD is much harder to treat than a traumatized person so we have this enormous challenge now to scale up trauma counseling and one of the things she was going to do we have some of the deepest and strongest trauma treatment in the country in fact

we maintain a unit called sadhanath Gal. When the Ministry of Defense declares a soldier incurable and the PTSD cannot be cured, they come to us. And we have this place on our grounds. And these are soldiers going back all the way to the War of Independence. And they do art and music and woodcraft and they make ceramics, et cetera. And it's a safe place for them. And they're lined up at five in the morning waiting for it to open because it's a day program. So we have a tremendous challenge. What she was going to do now is uh we but we are also very strong in training and simulation it's a whole nother topic we could do an hour on it we were one of the pioneers in the world in medical simulation training and uh simulators so we're

going to start doing crash courses to train trainers and train counselors we have a massive mental health challenge ahead this chart by the way this comes out of the ministry of defend a ministry of health every couple days i don't know how legible it is on your screen but the tall these are a number of patients per hospital in israel the tallest bar is sheba the next bar is sarosky and then you have the rest of the country so we have about a 40 percent of all hospitalized patients in the country are in chiba about 90 of all rehab patients and about 99 of all soldiers that need rehab are in uh in chiba so we're we're big innovators in in uh rehabilitation this is a two-story vr dome

that's used for rehabilitation we use everything from high-tech to uh we were leaders in aquatic rehabilitation the first amputee just went in the pool to sheba the dog um so the rehabilitation challenge is going to be immense there's a village a town little settlement near gaza called karen shalom this is on israeli territory it's inside the 1967 lines karen shalom means vineyard of peace and they you know there's the iron they're fired at a lot because they're one of the closest to the g of Peace and they you know there's the iron they're fired at a lot because they're one of the closest to the Gaza Strip and they get a lot of rocket fire and Iron Dome is good but it's only about 90 95 so rockets do land so the the residents of Karen Shalom decided every time a rocket landed in the settlement they would um they would plant a tree

in the spot where the rocket landed so this is Amikai shinler with his family those are all his kids planting uh planting a tree the day of october 7th amikai shinler ran with his family into their mamad into their safe room but the door latch wasn't working right so he had to hold the door with his bare hands and they began an attempt to get in the room they began firing through the door and he held the door for what he he says hours i don't know how long it was, but for a long time, he held the door while they're firing through the door. The result was that he lost one hand and all the fingers, but one on the other hand, he was very severely wounded. Brought to Sheba. Within days, they had him up and walking. And now he's ready for rehabilitation. And then the final story I want to close with. This was a and again, it talks, this shows you the two sides here. This is an elite paratrooper named Roi Nahari. And Roi was killed defending in the aftermath, before they had quite cleaned everyone out around Gaza. Roi was shot, brought to Sheba critically wounded with, he was not going to survive so his family made the decision to donate any usable organs of his and his organs then went to five different patients that is a box

that his heart was in on the left is yelp heled who's uh from shayetta from israel shatt israel's navy seals she's the head of a heart transplant unit his heart went to a man who'd been on the heart transplant waiting list for many many years a, a 63-year-old man. And his organs went to five different people. Roe Nahari's lungs went to an Israeli Arab to save the life of an Arab resident of Israel who was in full lung failure, who was not going to live without donated lungs. And he was saved by Roe Nahari's lungs. And this, again again these stories are tough

and they sound they're so there's there's such a stark contrast it's it sounds like they're being relayed to to upset people but they're just factual you know another contrast here I just can't help it but when you mentioned it so sheba had a patient come from Gaza, a baby that was born without an immune system. And the baby needed a stem cell transplant to regenerate the baby's immune system, but there was no suitable donor. So Sheba said to the mother from Gaza, if you have another, go home back to Gaza, have another baby, bring the new baby here. And that baby is likely to be a match for your infant and will save your infant's life with a stem cell transplant. And that's exactly what happened. She had another baby, came back to Sheba. They did a stem cell transplant to

save the life of her first child. So we have on one side Hamas spraying bullets into cribs, and we have in Sheba going to great lengths to save the life of a single infant from Gaza. I think that's one of the beautiful things on Shiva and really of the Israeli spirit and the Jewish spirit. lobbying different groups to let it be known that what is going on at American universities is really not something that we should accept. For those that just saw it in the last couple days at MIT, which in my mind has always been one of the greatest institutions on the planet, Jewish students were asked to enter through the back in order to accommodate for the protesters and for the violent activity from Hamas supporters. And I will not call them Palestinian supporters. In terms of Sheba Hospital, in terms of what we could practically do,

we are, of course, asking that anybody that can make a contribution this year has not yet maxed out their personal contribution, consider contributing to Sheba Hospital. As we mentioned earlier, Sheba Hospital is not only the biggest, but also one of the most innovative hospitals in the Middle East. And it's absolutely critical from a strategic standpoint to have Sheba out there and to have it in the news telling the Israeli story and how the Jewish state and Israel can continue to be a good partner in the Middle East. I think, unfortunately, this whole debacle happened right before it seemed like Saudi and Israel was going to have peace. But I still believe that with the right effort, we could continue to beat the drum of peace and try to drown out the war.