[Israel Business Series] Can Data Predict Life or Death Medical Care Before the Patient Shows Signs? With Gal Salomon CEO of CLEW Medical

Gal Salomon is the CEO and Founder of CLEW Medical, a company that uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve the outcome of critically ill patients. They help doctors predict who needs life or death medical care before they’re needed.

Before founding CLEW Medical, Gal founded Sansa Security and led the company as CEO until 2010. He then served as the Chairman of the Board until the acquisition of ARM. During this time, he was also a Venture Partner at Pitango Venture Capital. Gal has also previously served in multiple positions at Intel and DSP Communications.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Gal Salomon shares how his mother inspired the founding of CLEW Medical
• How Gal broke into the healthcare sector with a new solution
• Gal talks about their study on sepsis at Mayo Clinic
• How the CLEW Medical critical care predictive analysis works
• Gal talks about how COVID-19 has affected their work at CLEW Medical
• Gal discusses the process for getting FDA clearance for COVID-19
• The objections CLEW Medical received and how Gal pushed through them
• Gal talks about the challenges that came with convincing doctors to join the CLEW Medical team
• Gal explains why now is a tough time for his company and what they can do to help address COVID-19

In this episode…

Imagine losing a loved one because of an avoidable healthcare mistake. When health professionals fail to react on time and pay attention to detail, it can lead to a devastating loss that no one can really prepare for. Gal Salomon experienced this kind of loss when he lost his mother when healthcare workers failed to respond quickly to her needs. And Gal took it upon himself to find a technological solution to help doctors predict who needs life or death medical care before they’re actually needed.

Bringing new solutions in the healthcare industry is extremely difficult, especially as when you’re an outsider. But Gal managed to find a work around the initial resistance and founded CLEW Medical.

On this episode of Inspired Insider Dr. Jeremy Weisz talks with the CEO and Founder of CLEW Medical, Gal Salomon, about his inspiration for starting his company and what they do to help save lives. Gal also shares how they utilize artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve the outcomes for critically ill patients, how they pushed back against the initial objections they faced, and the process they had to go through to get FDA clearance. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned on this episode

• CLEW Medical
• Gal Salomon on LinkedIn
• Article: FDA cleared: Israeli tech to warn doctors before COVID-19 patients deteriorate

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Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. This is part of the Israel Business Leaders series other companies that you should check out and people that we’ve had on interviewed that have been interviewed Yossi Vardi, whose involvement is really texting for 50 years Kendago, which is a fast growing agency, the Mobileeye journey being acquired by Intel for $13.2 billion. And Uri Adoni talks about his book, The unstoppable Startup. So check that out. And the episode is brought to you buy Rise25, which I co founded with my business partner, John Corcoran, and we help b2b businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 partnerships and clients by helping you run your podcast. So, you know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And having a podcast has been the best thing for me to give to my best relationships, have them on a platform and talk about what they’re working on, and how they’re changing the world like Gal is so they have questions about starting a podcast, go to Rise25.com we’ve been doing it for over 10 years. At this point, it’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. So I also want to thank you to Shawn Levy and Extra mine for introducing me today’s guest with Gal Salomon, a CEO and Founder of CLEW which you just heard about. It uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve the outcome of critically ill patients. Basically, what this means Gol is it helps doctors predict who needs life or death medical care before they actually need it a lot of times, so prior to founding CLEW, he founded Sansa Security and led the company as CEO for the reception until 2010. He then served as Active Chairman until the acquisition of ARM and during this time, he was Venture Partner at Pitongo Venture Capital. And he served in multiple positions in at Intel and DSP Communications, Gal thanks for joining me, really appreciate it. Um, one of the inspirations behind this is your mom.

Gal Salomon

That’s correct. Yeah, you know, I’ve been holding many and many types of technology across different kinds of companies in different areas. And you know, for someone which basically manage different teams, different companies and different flavors, you’re coming to the point that you’re working very, very hard, you know, to take the company from being a dream to being reality, and, you know, most of the companies are being acquired. And I’ve went to this journey as well. And then know, after two companies we can manage and sold. And I moved to the to the other side of the table, which is becoming investors, and with the larger this year. And, and unfortunately, during this time that I moved, you know, my mother passed away. And she passed away, for no reason. Absolutely no reason. I mean, yes, he was a cancer. I mean, he had a cancer. But he didn’t die from cancer she died from, from the fact that the medical team didn’t put attention to the small details, they didn’t react in time, they didn’t know what that and like, in two days, she’s gone. And, and then that was so sad, because you’re coming aside, you know, you’re going to the hospital could get a treatment, you believe that, you know, in two, three days, you’re going to be all going back to your home. And then you were dying for nothing. And, and I say that to myself very clearly that it’s about time that I will do something really different something which which needs to be matter. It’s not another gadget, it’s not another publication. It’s not another PC, mobile phone, whatever. I mean, I and I’ve done tons of those. But I didn’t done anything, which is significant. And we want to make any, we want to leave something behind. And and and I took this case, and I said there is no way in the world that technology cannot help. And then I started this, this journey. I took a friend, Victor which is working with me here who used to be my Vp r&d in my previous company. And I said to him, let’s build The company that we serve, we serve like, again, we didn’t know we didn’t knew anything about healthcare, we didn’t knew anything about ICU, we didn’t know anything about, you know, what is acute patients, what is intensive care. And obviously, we didn’t done anything about COVID. Because COVID just come just came in the last couple of months. But we said, Guys, we know what is what is state, how we can build the algorithm. And how we can build the more than that can help to understand what’s going on. And together with a very small group of people is always starting, we started in my garage, as always, and we came in said, Let’s look for a place that you have enough data. Because without data, you can do anything. And let’s build a model that helps to manage patient based on more things in the area of artificial intelligence, this is how we started. So the only place that you have the data in the high density data was in the critical care. So we took a critical care doc, very promising one, touched it to the team and said, Okay, let’s go and be the system that can save lives. And this is exactly what we’re doing here in CLEW. And I’m here not because of the next exit, I’m here to make an impact. And we’re here to make a company large and successful company. Because by the end of the day, for me, you and I can make mistakes. And we’re probably doing you know, tons of mistakes every day. But when medical teams are making mistakes that can be tragic to be here. And this, that was what happened to me. Yeah. And, and I’m coming and said, Look, from being here almost five years, spending my time in different healthcare system, I can see in which type of pressure the medical team is working, they can just what is happening right now, right now with COVID-19, which the medical team is working like with ongoing shift, so for 18 hours, 19 hours a day, this is impossible. I mean, the amount of pressure, the amount of responsibility they have, I mean, you must have went in and you don’t have enough people, you don’t have enough doctor, you don’t have enough nurses. And and you need your priorities. And this COVID-19 kind of stuff, no one really can understand how it was created, how it’s working, you don’t have one case, which is exactly like the other case, every case is completely different. Yeah. And in here, the only place that I believe that technology can help us in those kinds of places. And and, and I believe that we’re not coming through place the medical team because this, those are the ones that need to take a decision, we’re here to advise them what to do. Because if I will tell you what we be the future of this patient, or what will happen within the next five hours, I guess that you can do lots of thing with this kind of element, because you need to remember two types of things that medicine is everything about evidence. in, in, in every med school around the world. The the sentence about evidence based medicine is created. And this is the Bible. The problem that we have in ICU, that when you have an evidence, it’s already too late. And when you have a clinical sign that something is going to happen, you probably miss the train already. And this is why we’re breathing disillusion, which we have to predict we want to be proactive rather than be reactive. Because if we’re going to be reactive, we continue to lose patience. We need to make the early intervention because you have tons of papers around early intervention equal to better outcome and this is what we’re trying to do here.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah, first of all, gone. So sorry to hear about your mom. You know, that’s it’s tragic. And you went about to really solve a really big issue and problem. And I can see, you know, originally I was gonna say, well, we’re How did you choose where to go? And it sounds like well, the intensive care has the most amount of data that they’re capturing from patients. So that makes it the easiest in the beginning to serve that particular unit. So I could totally see that. Um, I want to talk about the FDA in a second. But, you know, it’s it’s not easy to break into the medical field with new solutions. You know, they, like you said, doctors and facilities want to see evidence they want to see, has this been proven? How is this proven? And then you said, Well, we had no experience with this. How did you break into? And right now I saw like on your advisory board, and your, you know, Board of Directors, you have people from Harvard, you have people from University of Chicago feel from all over the United States and Israel working on this? How did you get these people on board and break into, like, the first place to test this?

Gal Salomon

So as always, you’re coming with a vision. And we’re using, you know, these rarely worked chutzpah, which is, I mean, don’t be shocked. And I’m using whatever I can, and using, you know, every single connection. And and when we started, it was clear that we need to build the present, we need to build, you know, the notion that we’re now what we’re doing, which we didn’t know, I mean, to be quite honest, we can with idea that was changed, you know, every single day, it was changed, like 20 times. And, but then, when we started to build the structure of all boards, including guys from Harvard, from in from Chicago, from Stanford, from, from Emory, a from Mayo Clinic, a you always coming with the green, you always coming with a passion about guys that want to make a change helped me to make a change. And then, you know, as you said, then this is this is still true. You know, and medicals. I mean, it’s not enough to come in with whistles and whispered I mean, you need to come with evidence. And we started, you know, on our journey with the with the clinical study that we have done with Mayo Clinic. One of the best name that exists, which they didn’t believe in anything that we have said to them with it. Yeah, I totally

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