An Israeli start-up is using Israeli expertise in intelligence to save people’s health and lives.
When Tanya Attias moved back to Israel after a period in Singapore, she learned that a friend of hers had gotten sick. Her friend needed to make a decision about which treatment to undergo, and Attias decided to use her experience of several years in the field of intelligence technology – first serving in the Israeli Armed Forces and then in the private sector – to help her.
“I knew that I could help, because I knew how to look at data and analyze it very fast,” Attias explained to The Jerusalem Post. “I was shocked when I understood that in the field of medicine these tools were not used. People go to the doctor and then they follow what the doctor tells them to do. But even the best doctor cannot be updated about everything, every new treatment developed, every publication, every possibility.”
Six years later, 32-year-old Attias is the co-founder and CEO of Medint, a company that uses its technology to extract all relevant medical data available by crawling medical journals, websites of health ministries, medical applications and more to provide patients, doctors and health officials with crucial information to make the best decisions.
“The same way the security forces or any government branch need information to make a decision in all kinds of scenarios, this is true also for patients,” the entrepreneur said. “Imagine a patient who is diagnosed with a very serious tumor, such as GPN, a very aggressive form of brain cancer. They would love to know of anyone from all over the world who received different forms of successful treatment. Maybe there are very encouraging preliminary results from a novel cure which was tried in Australia. The problem is that to this day there is no comprehensive database with all this information. And medical data all over the world is expanding very rapidly.”
Medint, which currently employs some 30 people, including data experts, doctors and researchers, offered a solution to this problem. The company offers information about all knowledge and options available about a specific medical situation and helps the customers – whether individuals or professionals – to connect with the relevant experts.
Attias said its services are covered by Israeli healthcare providers, and they are working so that medical insurances in other countries, starting with the US, do the same.
After helping thousands of individual patients in their decision-making process, sometimes in a matter of hours – such as in cases where emergency surgery had to be carried out, and more than one option was available – the company has started to also work with hospitals and governments. Among others, Attias explained that they cooperate with organizations in Israel, Canada and Singapore.
Medint has also been at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Even before the disease hit Israel, the company had assembled a team working to gather as much information as possible, which included a Chinese speaker.
When the Health Ministry needed to purchase medical equipment such as masks and protective suits, they provided information to make sure that the authorities would go to the best and safest suppliers.
“Today, among other things, we are working on gathering information about people who get vaccinated but because of their health condition don’t develop an adequate protection against COVID to create a protocol for them,” Attias explained. “We are also looking into the topic of inoculating children.”
“Our next mission is to be able to foresee the next pandemic, or a new vaccine-resistant mutation,” she concluded. “We want to be able to alert our government and our clients that something dangerous is coming before it is too late. Our mission is to be the intelligence unit for health issues.”