Tampa General Hospital Announces Partnership with Sheba Medical Center to Benefit Local, State and International Communities

TAMPA, Fla., April 19, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center announced a partnership grounded in a shared commitment to accelerating medical innovation and best practices. Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center, the leading medical center in the Middle East, located near Tel Aviv, Israel, are entering into a three-year collaboration agreement that will generate groundbreaking developments in healthcare services, education, training, and innovation.

This three-year collaboration will focus on the areas of:

• Education & Training
• Innovation
• Scientific Events
• Delegation Visits Between Hospitals
• Bilateral Research

"This partnership will boost our vision for Tampa General Hospital to be the safest and most innovative academic health center in America," said Tampa General Hospital president and CEO John Couris. "In partnership with the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, and our combined Office of Clinical Research, we will be sharing our talents in the areas of education, training, research and technology that will directly impact the lives of the people we care for in Tampa, and across the region and state, and eventually even beyond."

Sheba Medical Center is the largest hospital in Israel and consistently ranks among the top medical facilities in the world. Sheba Medical Center takes great pride in their international collaborations and believes sharing their medical knowledge and research with other institutions benefits the rest of the world.

"We are very excited about the prospect of working directly with Tampa General Hospital, one of America's foremost academic medical facilities" said Yoel Har-Even, director of Sheba International. "As hope has no boundaries, we believe that combining our collective medical knowledge and injecting our innovative technological know-how will be beneficial to everyone in the metro Tampa region, the state and internationally."

Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center share a passion for innovation and leading change in the healthcare setting and investing in technologies to improve patient experience and outcomes. Both have actively embraced the use of artificial intelligence to monitor care and regulate patient flow throughout their institutions.

Additionally, both are launching innovation hubs to support emerging companies and technology to develop effective solutions for clinical care needs. In 2020, Tampa General founded TGH Innoventures to spur innovation within the institution and transform the future of healthcare through the support of early-stage startups and direct investments. Sheba Medical Center established the ARC Center in 2019, which stands for "Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate" to give Israeli healthcare startups the opportunity to collaborate with expert physicians and hospital staff to implement global change in medicine.

In recent months, hundreds of new ideas and designs for finding technological models to help predict patient deterioration from the coronavirus have originated at Sheba's Corona Hub, located on campus at the ARC Innovation Center.

Over the next few months, Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center will work together to identify best opportunities and paths forward to extend innovation and new developments into real world applications to improve the health of patients and local, statewide and global communities.

This new collaboration is not the first experience Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center have working together. The organizations first came together in June 2020 to present a coronavirus- focused webinar where they shared experiences and insights. The successful event sparked the idea for a greater partnership between institutions. 

About Tampa General Hospital
Tampa General Hospital, a 1007-bed non-profit academic medical center, is one of the largest hospitals in America and delivers world-class care as the region's only center for Level l trauma and comprehensive burn care. Tampa General Hospital is the highest-ranked hospital in the market in U.S. News & World Report's 2020-21 Best Hospitals, and one of the top four hospitals in Florida, with five specialties ranking among the best programs in the United States. It is one of the nation's busiest adult solid organ transplant centers and is the primary teaching hospital for the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. With five medical helicopters, Tampa General Hospital transports critically injured or ill patients from 23 surrounding counties to receive the advanced care they need. Tampa General houses a nationally accredited comprehensive stroke center and its 32-bed Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit is the largest on the West Coast of Florida. It also is home to the Jennifer Leigh Muma 82-bed Level IV neonatal intensive care unit, and a nationally accredited rehabilitation center. Tampa General Hospital's footprint includes 17 Tampa General Medical Group Primary Care offices, TGH Family Care Center Kennedy, TGH Brandon Healthplex, TGH Virtual Health and 19 outpatient Radiology Centers. Tampa Bay residents also receive world-class care from the TGH Urgent Care powered by Fast Track network of clinics, and they can even receive home visits in select areas through TGH Urgent Care at Home, powered by Fast Track.  As one of the largest hospitals in the country, Tampa General Hospital is first in Florida to partner with GE Healthcare and open a clinical command center that uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve and better coordinate patient care at a lower cost.  For more information, go to www.tgh.org.

About Sheba Medical Center 
Born together with Israel in 1948, Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer is the largest and most comprehensive medical center in the Middle East. Sheba is the only medical center in Israel that combines an acute care hospital and a rehabilitation hospital on one campus, and it is at the forefront of medical treatments, patient care, research and education. As a university teaching hospital affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University, it welcomes people from all over the world indiscriminately. For the past two years (2019 and 2020), Newsweek Magazine has named Sheba one of the top ten hospitals in the world. For more information, visit: eng.sheba.co.il.

SOURCE Tampa General Hospital