United Hatzalah founder and president Eli Beer received the Conference of European Rabbis’ second-place prize for innovative technology during the Slush Conference in Helsinki on November 30, 2017.

CER prizes are awarded annually to three individuals or organizations whose technological innovations are making a better world for all of humanity. This year, more than 400 applicants vied for the honor.

Beer accepted the award for United Hatzalah’s Moskowitz LifeCompass, a tracking app that dispatches volunteer EMS personnel based on their proximity to the scenes of medical emergencies.

“We created our app before smartphones existed based solely on GPS technology,” Beer said. “Through utilizing the application we have been successful at dramatically cutting down EMS response time to less than three minutes countrywide and helping to treat more than 2.5 million people in the past decade.”

The app — first in the world to apply advanced GPS tracking technology to the field of EMS — gets its name from Florida supporters Cherna Moskowitz and her late husband Irving. “They supported the development of the technology from its infancy and saw it grow into what it is today, one of the most advanced EMS dispatching systems in the world,” said Beer.

Event organizer Franciska Goldschmidt-Kosman said the CER prize is meant “to recognize the world of innovation and technology that is helping people … and making tomorrow better than yesterday.”

The Slush Conference is an entrepreneurial social networking platform started by students to facilitate founder and investor meetings in an effort to build a worldwide startup community. It is active in northern Europe as well as China, Japan, and other parts of eastern Asia.

(via Israel21c)

[Photo: Israel21c ]