Israeli entrepreneur, Noam Kalina, Chief Business Officer of patient engagement tool innovator GistMD, recounts his recent visit to Leeds.
GistMD is a personalised digital health interventions platform that empowers patients to take an active
role in their healthcare journey. The platform provides patients with highly personalised education content and engagement tools, to help close gaps in care and improve patient engagement. One of the key features of GistMD is its personalised content, which is tailored to factor in the patient’s demographic, linguistic, medical, pre-conditions, medication, cultural, and behavioural factors, in order to provide information about medical conditions and treatments in an accessible and understandable way.
Noam Kalina, Chief Business Officer of GistMD, explained: “We believe that in order for a patient to be driven into action, they must first understand. We do this in a very personalised manner.
“We offer patient engagement tools, allowing them to book an appointment with a doctor or read more about their condition. The end goal of all of this is to drive the patient into action.”
For example, if you show a Black child in America a video with only white patients in it, they will shut off. Then we offer patient engagement tools, allowing them to book an appointment with a doctor or read more about their condition. The end goal of all of this is to drive the patient into action.”
Noam recently visited Leeds and Manchester with the hope of expanding the technology to patients in the UK: “The visit to Leeds was part of an on-going application for a joint venture with the Israeli Innovation Authority and the NHSA (Northern Health Science Alliance). After a few rounds of consideration, we’ve been shortlisted by the NHSA and we were invited to come to meet them and go into more in-depth details of what we can do together and to start planning the development stage of the product we’ll do together.”
Though none of the group had visited Leeds before, the city immediately made an impression: “This was our first time visiting and we fell in love with the area. We loved the people and the countryside. I don’t know if we brought the sun over from Israel but it was actually sunny while we were there! My wife also has relatives in Leeds, so I reached out to them, and on one of the days we were there, they arranged a big meeting with several key people from the Jewish community. Colin Glass was one of them. He’s a tube of dynamite. Everyone knows him, he has a lot of will to help and a lot of energy.
“He also took us to the community’s Yom HaShoah service, as his guests. It was very impressive and powerful. Before the ceremony he took us on a two hour trip around Leeds and took us to the park and to see the lake. We met a lot of welcoming people thanks to Colin and thanks to the family of my wife, Michelle and Ivan Levey. We made some great business connections and overall it was an amazing trip.”