Eli Beer’s father collapsed in his arms. Two decades of paramedic training flew out the window. But Beer literally had a panic button on his mobile phone, and he managed to push it. Two volunteers who lived across the street rushed to the scene to revive Beer senior. Nine minutes after he regained his pulse, the ambulance pulled up.

Thanks to Beer and a 1,600-strong volunteer network called United Hatzalah of Israel (“hatzalah” is Hebrew for rescue or relief) that he created, such stories have become commonplace in Israel. Some 181,000 people received quick-fire medical attention last year – free of charge. Many calls are for life threatening conditions or traumas, with heart attacks and traffic accidents leading the way. The nonprofit emergency medical services organization cites scientific studies that point to higher survival rates and better recovery if medical attention is provided within five minutes of an incident. Given congested urban streets and distances in the countryside of Israel, ambulances usually take longer. Combining a network of geographically distributed volunteers with a dispatching system with ground-breaking technology, United Hatzalah boasts a response time of between two and four minutes.

Beer found his calling at the age of seven. Making his way home from school in Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon in June, he walked right into the scene of a terrorist bomb attack on a bus. Among the passengers were some of his classmates. “No one knew what to do,” he said. “People were yelling, ‘Ambulance! Ambulance’ – but it took a long time” for help to arrive.

At 16 he joined a volunteer ambulance corps, but became frustrated by delays that cost lives. “Why not have neighbors provide the first response?” he thought. In 1990, with a group of friends, Beer approached a local ambulance company to ask them to forward calls. At first the firm refused, so the budding volunteers bought a radio scanner to monitor emergency calls. Seeing how effective they were, ambulance companies started sharing information and similar groups began cropping up around the country.

The demands of the 2006 Lebanon War revealed the gaps in the hodge-podge system, so Beer engineered coordination under the United Hatzalah umbrella. That nationwide network represents one thing that sets United Hatzalah off from other community-based volunteer medical programs, including some run by Jewish organizations in the United States.

The other is the LiveCompass Command Center, a central dispatch service that uses proprietary software that integrates the latest GPS tracking technology. Conceived of by United Hatzalah and developed by a company called NowForce, the software performs an algorithm in five seconds to identify the closest and most qualified volunteers and immediately alert them via a mobile telephone. Volunteers can also use it to communicate with each other, including by pressing that panic button. NowForce provides development free of charge and channels one-third of profits of the software’s commercial sales to United Hatzalah. As fire departments and other first response units take heed, these revenues may ultimately ensure the group’s financial viability in a way that the current donation-based model cannot.

Volunteers include physicians and paramedics, but also just regular folks. They must complete a rigorous training program to earn a license as an emergency medical technician. Then they are provided a kit similar to those used by professional paramedics. “Volunteers include journalists, lawyers, people in the fish market, millionaires who don’t need to work, poor people who have a hard time makings ends meet,” said Beer. “Anyone who wants to volunteer and has a good heart.”

Having earned recognition from the Geneva-based Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and received the Presidential Award for Volunteerism from Shimon Peres, Beer hopes to take the model abroad. Most recently he met with a group of potential volunteers in France. “When you save someone’s life, nothing can match that feeling,” he said.

CONNECT THE DOTS

For more information, visit United Hatzalah’s website. A video of an United Hatzalah rescue operation after a traffic accident can be found on YouTube: The Geneva-based Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship offers a bio of Eli Beer and details on his organization. The Jerusalem-based company NowForce develops the software for the dispatch system.  For more news about technology that can be helpful in medical emergencies, check out our blog post, “In Case of Emergency Phone App.”