“Precision medicine is coming to women as well thanks to artificial intelligence”

“I will sit in the hospital and see a woman about to give birth while the AI system whispers to me: ‘This woman has an 80% chance of postpartum bleeding, notify the blood bank. There is also a risk the baby may suffer from oxygen deprivation, so do the right thing,’” said Prof. Asnat Walfisch, Head of the Helen Schneider Hospital for Women, describing how technology is expected to transform delivery rooms.

Prof. Walfisch spoke in an interview with Netally Binshtock from Calcalist during the Mind the Tech Berlin 2025 conference organized by Calcalist and Leumi.

Take us into the delivery rooms and clinics where you treat pregnant women. How is this world going to change because of AI?

“I want to give a few examples of how the world is changing. When women become pregnant, they expect a perfect outcome because the risks are very low. Most women don’t need the medical system during delivery, only in the rare cases where complications arise. Our role is to predict those complications. Think about it: hundreds of thousands of women want a perfect birth, but only one will have a terrible experience. I need to identify and prevent that, and this is where AI comes in.

“The technology helps me aggregate all the data to predict the risk of complications among these women, who are all different from one another. Prediction is one of the areas where AI helps us, and it can do this not only before birth. We are working on a dynamic forecast that will allow us to monitor how risks change during labor.”

The war in Israel over the past two years changed everything but also encouraged innovation. Reality forced us to develop new technologies. Is it an Israeli advantage that we are so experienced with rare cases?

“First, Israel is different from most countries because we truly love babies, our fertility rate is 2.9 children per woman. We have extremely broad datasets in Israel, which can significantly help when using AI. In addition, the war pushed us toward remote medicine, and we now use many remote tools and diverse technologies.

“In Israel, we have a high number of children, like in developing countries, but we deliver medicine at the level of the most advanced Western states. We are in a unique situation.”

You also serve as Deputy Dean at the Reichman School of Medicine. All future doctors will need to use advanced technologies such as AI. How do you prepare them?

“Medical education is my passion. It is one of our most important responsibilities as doctors, to educate the next generation. The problem is that about 50% of the knowledge we teach today will be irrelevant in a few years. Students sit in lecture halls, the professor feeds them information, and they memorize it. That needs to end.

“The entire paradigm of medical studies is changing. We need to understand the tools available today, the technologies. So instead of students sitting in a lecture listening to a professor, we place them in small teams, give them a clinical problem, and they use AI tools to make medical judgments and build the right plan. Future doctors will act faster, and medicine will be far more precise than today.”

“I want to share my dream: today, when you go to a doctor, instead of listening to you, they are constantly typing on the computer without looking at you. That must disappear. We will have AI tools in the room that listen to the conversation, providing a summary of your medical history, capturing what was said, and helping me give advice. It will then create a medical plan and schedule appointments. Medical care will improve dramatically without me needing to take my eyes off the patient.”

So technology and AI will actually make medical care more human?

“Absolutely.”

You can watch the full exchange in the video above.