BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

Among other roles, the Institute is responsible for operating the national Program for Quality Indicators of Community Medicine 165 that was spawned by research on the feasibility of formulating community health quality indicators. The research originated in Beer Sheva. The Program was set in motion by the National Institute in an agreement with the Ministry of Health that the Program’s budget would come from within the Institute’s budget. There are those who give more weight to competition among the sick funds than I do, and there are those who give it less weight, but all would admit that the Indicators Program played a major part in the OECD’s praise of the community health system in Israel, defining it as one of the best among among OECD countries, an achievement that shouldn’t be belittled. 166 Even China has approached the Institute requesting to learn from Israel how to organize community health indicators. The Work of the National Institute The National Institute holds an international conference. The conference has a history going back to my years at Clalit as I strived to broaden the perspective of discussion on problems in the health system. Because many of the problems in the health system are shared by various other countries in the world, I viewed an international outreach as a very important matter; and up until a number of years ago, I coordinated this endeavor. Today, responsibility for it rests with Prof. Shlomo Mor Yosef. 167 But I need to back up a bit to share some additional information on how the National Institute came into operation: During my sabbatical in the USA and the UK, I decided to stop at the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, in order to meet with an Israeli serving in a senior position there, Dr. Yehoshua Cohen. Cohen had been a veteran in the Israeli Ministry of Health, dealing with hospital planning. He collaborated closely with Moshe Soroka in this area; and unlike others, his relationship with Clalit’s people was very good. Afterwards, for 19 years Yehoshua Cohen had served as the right-hand man to the director-general of WHO. His experience was unique. As the senior health policy advisor to the director-general, he was the one who formulated WHO’s “Health for All” program. I knew of him and we were sightly acquainted. Prior to my sabbatical I called Cohen and requested to meet with him in Geneva to consult with him about the international activity of the future national institute. At this point, plans for the Institute were only in the thinking stage. As we sat, he told me he would be returning to Israel soon. I told him, if so, I wanted him to join our work establishing the Institute. He arrived back home when the Institute was already in existence, and he joined its operations. He was responsible for running the National Institute’s first interntional conference, which was very successful. The head of the international department at the Institute was Pnina Herzog. 168 She had a warm attitude towards Clalit, and we were close on a personal plane. Pnina Herzog would invite us as guests to receptions at her home. At one juncture, she asked me to act as a state envoy to the WHO Office for Europe in Copenhagen on a particular apect of primary medicine and I did so. She also requested we at Clalit prepare an annual report on the state of health in Israel for WHO, which I did collaboratively with Dr. Yehoshua Cohen. 165 The Program for Quality Indicators began as an initiative of a group of scholars at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in collaboration with the four sick funds. It was underwritten by the National Institute for Health Policy Research. The underlying research developed a system of uniform indicators for measuring the quality of community medicine in a manner that would enable reliable evaluation of the quality of care, based on national and international goals and benchmarks, as well as trends in performance over time. In 2004, the quality indicators were adopted by the Ministry of Health and became a national program operating on a permanent footing. 166 See Chapter 5 and Footnote 67. 167 Prof. Shlomo Mor Yosef (1951- ) is a 1980 graduate of Hebrew University’s medical school. He was Director- General of Hadassah Hospital for 11 years, concluding in 2011. Between 2012-2016, he was the Director-General of the Bituach Leumi, the National Insurance Institute of Israel, and from 2017-2021, he was the Director-General of the Population and Immigration Authority. He was the Chairman of the Board of the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research between the years 2008-2014. 168 Pnina Herzog (1925-2005) was a pharmacist and a PhD. She worked in public health in Israel in various positions related to drugs and drug trials. This led to her having several roles with the World Health Organization.

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