Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital, has become OpenAI’s first international hospital partner, part of a plan to run an AI-powered campus by 2030. The agreement gives clinicians across Sheba’s network, including on mobile devices, access to ChatGPT for Healthcare, with implementation across clinical, research and operational teams set to begin in the coming months.
The partnership grew from inside the hospital. Sheba’s head of engineering pushed the initiative, and the hospital approached OpenAI directly, according to Ayelet Akselrod-Ballin, head and CTO of Sheba’s AI Center. She told Drug Discovery and Development that building an AI hospital means more than buying technology. It also means educating staff and giving them self-service access to whatever tools exist.
Sheba brings a 50-plus-person AI center inside ARC, its innovation arm, and notably does not run on Epic, the dominant US EHR vendor, giving OpenAI a test bed outside the American stack.
Why it matters: OpenAI has pitched ChatGPT for Healthcare mainly to US systems. The Sheba deal extends that push internationally and signals how hospitals outside the United States are wiring frontier models into clinical workflow.
