The Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center serves the 360,000 inhabitants of the Greater Tel Aviv metropolitan area and more than a million people who enter the city every day. In the 1990s, it was a veritable “Tower of Babel” of various anachronistic medical and clinical systems that did not communicate with each other. There was an urgent need for a platform that could integrate the handling and creation of medical and administrative information. “When I joined the Sourasky Medical Center I was immediately confronted with a lack of information for running the medical center. I found that the IT that supported Sourasky’s activity, as well as nine other governmental hospitals, was based on IT that was programmed 34 years ago,” explains Professor Gabriel Barbash, who was appointed Director General of the Medical Center in 1993. “We decided – and this is a very important point – that we were going to develop one system for all of the hospitals.”

In 1999, Israel’s government hospital computerization project was initiated, with the aim of computerizing the administrative and operational systems of the 11 government hospitals and to create a comprehensive, unified IT system. The software selected was SAP® for Healthcare. In addition to that, it was decided to implement Siemens i.s.h.med^® hospital information system. Today, i.s.h.med serves 12,000 users, the largest number of i.s.h.med users in hospitals in a single country. “We were looking for a system that can talk to the SAP system, so i.s.h.med was a clear choice,” reveals Professor Barbash. “There was no better choice. If you want the system to talk, correspond, and exchange data – which is a must where a hospital is concerned – you need to choose a medical system that is closely related, actually integrated, with the SAP system.”

i.s.h.med provides additional benefits that include the system’s extensive range of functions and its capability to be used hospital-wide.
The hospital computerization project was called NAMER – an acronym of the Hebrew word for administration of medical centers and the word for “tiger”. In 2003, NAMER was brought to life.
“Today we are implementing additional i.s.h.med modules,” explains Esther Saiag, MD, Deputy Director of Information and Operation of the Medical Center. Due to the successful experience working with i.s.h.med, the Sourasky Medical Center has recently decided to acquire all other i.s.h.med modules.