Tzafon Medical Center

Big heart, bold vision

Perched above the glimmering Sea of Galilee, Tzafon Medical Center has been a lifeline for Israel’s northern region since 1955, caring for local families, IDF soldiers, UN forces, and pilgrims alike.

It’s not the largest hospital, but it’s mighty. Tzafon was the first government hospital in Israel to earn accreditation from the Joint Commission International (JCI), proving that compassion and clinical excellence can coexist in harmony.

Behind the scenes, CTO Tzvika Klinger and CIO Ofir Wertheim lead a five-person IT team — yes, just five — that supports the entire hospital. Their secret? Big dreams, grit, smart architecture, and a touch of optimism

A small team with a mountain of responsibility

Running a full-scale medical facility is no easy feat, especially when your IT department is just five people strong. And Tzafon’s technology infrastructure supports everything — medical imaging, laboratory systems, appointment scheduling, clinical documentation, real-time patient care updates, and patient communications.

Before data modernization with NetApp, the team struggled with slow backups, delayed patient scheduling, and fragmented storage capacity across legacy systems, making it difficult to scale efficiently. The potential for downtime meant high stakes — the need to reschedule appointments, missed appointments, delayed diagnostics, frustrated clinicians, and restless patients. For Klinger and Wertheim, keeping systems operational wasn’t just an IT goal: It was a moral imperative. Any downtime was a risk to patient care.

A data backbone you can trust with your life

When lives are on the line, your data infrastructure can’t flinch. And so, Tzafon chose NetApp as its ICU-grade infrastructure partner.

Tzafon built a unified on-premises and cloud hybrid environment with NetApp FAS hybrid flash storage, NetApp^® MetroCluster^® IP, and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Think of it as giving your hospital infrastructure a bionic heart: always beating, always alert. With Amazon FSx for ONTAP, Tzafon backs up and archives high-volume imaging data from its PACS system. By extending its ONTAP environment into AWS, the hospital gets cloud flexibility with on-premises-like performance, allowing it to scale imaging storage without disruption or complexity.

Plus, NetApp Snapshot^™ technology and SnapMirror^® replication enable rapid recovery, while NetApp Console gives the team centralized visibility across both on-premises and cloud systems, crucial for lean operations.

Want proof of resilience? When an unexpected issue interrupted the data center’s cooling system, NetApp’s support team was on the line within minutes to help the Tzafon team fail over to another cluster and bring systems back online. The transition at the data center was so smooth that the users didn’t even notice it.

“It’s not just the tech,” Klinger says. “It’s knowing I can pick up the phone in the middle of the night and someone at NetApp will answer.”

Faster scans, happier patients, and more time to heal

Tzafon’s modernization with NetApp isn’t just about IT uptime — it’s about patient time.

The IT team’s most notable breakthrough? A fully digitized CAT scan request and scheduling system. Before, patients needed to submit requests by fax or mail, taking up to two weeks to process. Now, powered by NetApp’s high-availability infrastructure and seamless data flow between systems, a smart OCR and NLP-powered workflow interprets and routes requests in minutes. Patients now receive text confirmations and scheduling options within 48 hours.

With NetApp’s hybrid cloud architecture, the hospital ensures that these automated workflows are always accessible, responsive, and resilient. Snapshot and SnapMirror technologies protect the data that powers them, while Console gives the IT team visibility to troubleshoot and scale as demand grows.

Meanwhile, the team is using GenAI to draft clinical summaries, saving doctors and nurses precious time and improving communication with community physicians. Their research teams are leveraging imaging data to explore predictive models and heart disease, pushing the boundaries of rural healthcare innovation.

Small team. Giant impact.

Dreaming bigger with AI and cloud

Looking ahead, Tzafon isn’t just aiming to keep pace: It is planning to leap forward.

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights tops Wertheim and Klinger’s wish list for one key reason: Visibility fuels velocity. As a lean team running a full-scale hospital, deeper analytics into performance and data trends would be life-changing. With Data Infrastructure Insights, they see an opportunity to proactively detect bottlenecks, forecast storage needs, and fine-tune workloads before system issues affect care.

It’s a natural step for a team already embracing cutting-edge tools. Broader AI applications, deeper cloud integration, chatbot-based triage, automated alerts for physicians, and predictive models for hospital operations are also already in the works. As Wertheim puts it, “Even the biggest hospitals don’t move this fast.”