In June of this year, Prof. Yoram Weiss, MD, was officially named as the director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) in Jerusalem, the home of Hadassah’s two hospitals, Hadassah Ein Kerem and Hadassah Mount Scopus.

Prof. Weiss has spent the past 31 years at Hadassah, beginning with a medical internship and residency at Hadassah Ein Kerem in anesthesiology and intensive care. Subsequently, he was a fellow in intensive care at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he researched lung injuries. As a result of that experience, he believes strongly in the role of research at HMO. “If we want to compete for the best physicians and if we would like to maintain Hadassah as a leading institution,” he says, “we must understand that it goes hand-in-hand with having top-notch research in this organization. And we must understand that we need to invest in that.”

Accordingly, Prof. Weiss is bringing together the heads of the departments to strategize and plan for the technological changes that are sure to take place in the next three to five years. That way Hadassah will be at the forefront of new technologies and the research that will result from them.

A huge asset for HMO, Prof. Weiss comments, is the financial backing of Hadassah International. It is something he understands and deeply appreciates.

In an interview with Dianne Gottlieb, Hadassah HMO chair and member, Prof. Weiss explains how his new role gives him “in one way a huge feeling of accomplishment and, on the other hand, a huge weight of responsibility for this amazing institution” with which he has been associated for so many years.

 

Photo caption: Prof. Yoram Weiss greets brilliant Hadassah Ein Kerem cardiologist, Dr. Gidon Perlman (c). Dr. Perlman heroically continues his work despite being confined to a wheelchair and respirator.

Watch the interview below.