Professor Shlomo Ben-Haim has always been driven by a passion to help others.
As a medical doctor, professor, engineer, and entrepreneur, he has turned that passion into a successful medical innovation powerhouse which has touched the lives of more than 30 million patients around the globe.
Born and raised in Israel, he is one of the so-called Start-up Nation’s best-known and most successful entrepreneurs. He has invented and developed groundbreaking medical technology, authored more than 300 scientific papers, created more than 550 patents and established more than 20 companies over the years.
In the past, Shlomo has preferred to stay away from the spotlight even as interest in his work has increased. In this rare interview, The CEO Magazine speaks to Shlomo about innovation in the medical device field, his work with the Hobart Group, and his vision for the future of healthcare.
Shlomo started his career in medicine with an MD from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Specialising in cardiology, he treated heart patients in both Israel and the United States. He also gained a doctorate degree in physiology and biophysics from the Technion, building on prior formal education in nuclear physics, biomedical engineering, computer sciences, mathematics, and philosophy. He became a Professor of Medicine, Physiology, and Biophysics at the Technion and Harvard Medical School.
But through his medical practice, Shlomo began to realise that there was a limit to the effectiveness of procedures and treatments then available for many heart conditions he was seeing in his patients.
“Having this dual background in medicine and engineering helped me identify the addressable shortcomings of current therapies for a variety of medical conditions,” Shlomo says. Shlomo set out to do something about it, planning to establish new companies to carry out much-needed research and development in the area and to develop disruptive solutions that can treat patients suffering from lifelong chronic diseases with a single intervention.
