SmartER: Transforming Emergency Care Through Invisible AI
Case Study
The Challenge
Emergency departments operate under extreme pressure: high patient volumes, split-second decisions, and relentless administrative demands. Physicians spend much of each shift searching records, typing notes, and managing systems rather than treating patients.Â
This creates a vicious cycle:
- Information overload delays care delivery
- Manual documentation fuels clinician burnout
- Screen time erodes the human connection essential to quality medicine
- Smaller teams struggle to manage growing workloads safely and accurately
Sheba Medical Center recognized that emergency care needed more than incremental improvements; it required a fundamental redesign of how clinicians access information and document encounters.
The Solution
Developed by ARC, Sheba’s globally recognized innovation hub, in partnership with ScribeMD and Sheba’s AI Center, SmartER combines three integrated AI layers:
- Ambient documentation via real-time conversation capture
- Generative AI summarization of past charts, external records, and paper documents
- Clinical decision support for faster, smarter decision-making
The result is an invisible intelligence layer that works behind the scenes, saving physicians hours of administrative work per shift and acting as a force multiplier for entire departments.
As Dr. Haggai Eden, Emergency Medicine Specialist at Sheba Medical Center, explains:
“SmartER saves the doctor on average hours of administrative work each shift, mainly by eliminating the need for ongoing typing, information search and manual documentation. This is time that is freed up directly for medicine… The result is improved productivity, reduced mental strain, and higher clinical output, without compromising quality.”
Implementation
SmartER operates seamlessly across three phases of the patient journey: Real-Time Pre-Synthesis Before physicians enter the room, SmartER consolidates the patient’s reason for admission, nursing intake notes, full medical history, and diagnostic findings into one clinical overview, no manual searching required. Ambient Listening Powered by ScribeMD technology, SmartER captures natural doctor-patient conversations, automatically extracting symptoms, medications, risk factors, and key details into structured notes while physicians maintain eye contact and focus entirely on the patient. Automated Clinical Summary Post-encounter, SmartER generates comprehensive summaries combining pre-visit data with encounter details, eliminating after-hours documentation.Dr. Avi Irony, Director of Sheba’s Emergency Medicine Department, notes:
“In emergency medicine, every minute matters, and information overload directly affects both care delivery and patient experience. Even in its initial deployment, SmartER is already making a difference. It allows us to begin each encounter with a complete clinical picture and manage the patient journey more efficiently, resulting in less time spent on screens and more time devoted to medicine.”
Clinical use case:
A busy ER shift with back-to-back critical patients. SmartER delivers pre-synthesized histories instantly. Ambient listening captures encounters without typing. Structured notes appear automatically. Physicians focus entirely on diagnosis and human connection; hours of admin work vanish.
The Broader Impact
SmartER delivers measurable transformation across Sheba’s emergency department:
- Hours saved per shift through automated documentation
- Reduced burnout by minimizing screen time and cognitive load
- Force multiplier effect: Smaller teams handle larger, more complex caseloads
- Improved accuracy through consolidated clinical context
- Enhanced patient experience with more face time with their physician
Prof. Eyal Zimlichman, Sheba’s Chief Medical Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and ARC Founder, emphasizes: “The real challenge in medical AI goes beyond the algorithm to integrating it into daily clinical workflows. SmartER was built to fit naturally into the emergency department, supporting care continuity without adding burden or compromising the human experience.”
Sheba’s ARC innovation hub has evolved into a global blueprint for healthcare transformation, with a $5.8 billion portfolio value and active deployments across 31 health systems worldwide. SmartER represents the next frontier of that vision: using AI to restore what emergency medicine is fundamentally about: people.Â
Conclusion
SmartER represents Sheba Medical Center’s vision of AI as infrastructure, not mere additional accessories to care. Integrated with existing systems like Aidoc, advanced imaging, and Sheba First, the home-based emergency pre-assessment service, SmartER forms part of Sheba’s intelligent hospital ecosystem aiming for full AI-driven care by 2030, which aims to create compact, high-acuity facilities handling only complex cases, while AI-driven hybrid care delivers most treatment at home and in communities, eliminating geographic barriers to world-class medicine.
For emergency medicine leaders and healthcare innovators, SmartER demonstrates how ambient intelligence can restore what clinical care should always be about: human connection powered by invisible technology.Â
Through ARC’s global partnerships and Sheba’s clinical expertise, this model scales worldwide, proving AI can make medicine more human, not less. It is a vision the world has taken notice of: Sheba ranks #9 among Newsweek’s Smart Hospitals 2026, the only Israeli hospital among the global Top 10.
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