Prime Minister Edi Rama is currently in Tel Aviv, Israel, where he visited the Sheba Medical Center, ranked 8th in the world, with which the Albanian government is implementing the partnership agreement with QSUT, starting with the Oncology Department, where the Sheba team and the Albanian team now jointly work together, and continue with the establishment at QSUT of the Sheba center for innovation and artificial intelligence.

Prime Minister Rama was warmly welcomed by the leaders and doctors of the Center, who explained to him how the facility operates.
“Prime Minister, welcome! If you want to make a revolution, trust the young people because they are the ones who are sure of what they are doing and are the ones leading a new emergency pavilion today with real patients,” said one of the representatives of the Center, who invited Prime Minister Rama to observe a demonstration of how patients are guided using Artificial Intelligence.

‘’This emergency pavilion works with real patients, where the patient comes in and does not meet the doctor. Today, the doctor will be our patient, and what happens in real life is that our patient enters, provides their name and identification details, and starts a conversation with the doctor, who is the ‘Virtual Medical Assistant.’ The virtual assistant knows the patient’s entire medical history and asks the right questions to understand why the patient has come here.” – explained one of the young doctors at the Center.
Meanwhile, the representative from SHEBA emphasized that the highly advanced technology used is a great help for doctors, as it reduces their daily workload, as well as providing a significant benefit to patients, offering them services from some of the most specialized professionals.

“Doctors spend a lot of time gathering information, and with this system, when the patient arrives, the virtual assistant knows the entire medical history in seconds, because there is no way a human brain could do this. We cannot oversee the entire process, but after the conversation, the system will recommend imaging, laboratory tests, and the medical physical examination that needs to be done, and in the end, it will summarize the patient’s entire history, what they have, and what should be done in the future, whether it’s for hospitalization or if you can hear it yourself.
And after completing the history intake, the system itself determines the need for laboratory tests, because the doctor is usually under stress all the time, and the system knows exactly what should be done in the laboratory. It then directs the patient to imaging, where decisions are made, and you might think that we are perhaps being bold, and we are. People usually say not to start everything with the system, so we put the doctor here and they sit here, and this is the command center where they do the supervision and observation because we don’t have enough bold people to do everything only through machinery, but in the beginning, we are the first in the world to treat real patients in the emergency pavilion using Artificial Intelligence, but we do it under human supervision.
So, we’ve spent a lot of money to put the doctors here, but if we succeed within a year to prove that the system makes decisions like humans and doesn’t make more mistakes than humans, we could eliminate the need for a doctor, and this is a very efficient system. Now people tell me it’s a small change, but for us, it’s a big change. If we can reduce here 30% of the doctors’ workload, and here we have 800 patients every day. If we manage to reduce the doctor’s workload by 30 or 40%, we can achieve it, and this is a very good start.” – explained the representative of the Center.

Prime Minister Rama thanked them for the warm welcome and expressed his confidence in strengthening the cooperation between the two countries in this field.
“Thank you! It is a great honor and privilege, and I have been eagerly waiting to come here for a long time. I’m very glad this meeting became a reality, as well as the meeting with the doctors and the team from the ‘Mother Teresa’ hospital. We are also very happy about the future, thanks to your presence in Tirana and your support, which we greatly appreciate.” – said Prime Minister Rama.