Company leader
Oron Afek
Co-founder and CEO
Vim
Oron Afek is the co-founder and chief executive of Vim, which puts health plan data and third-party apps inside the electronic health records doctors use during visits. He served in a special forces unit of the Israel Defense Forces and founded four earlier companies in telecommunications, gaming, real estate and education.
Starting Out as BookMD
He started Vim in 2015 with Asaf David, now chief technology officer, and Yael Peled. The first product, BookMD, steered patients toward lower-cost imaging and procedures, on the premise that "if we can make it as easy as shopping on Amazon, people would change their behavior".
The company later moved from patients to doctors. Vim built software that connects to many EHRs at once and shows health plan data at the point of care, with its engineering largely in Israel and its customers in the US.
Lessons From Israel's Health System
He often contrasts the US with Israel, where four integrated health funds act as both insurer and provider. "Our personal motivation for establishing Vim was the 'caring' part", he explained, and he sees value-based care as the way to align payers and doctors. In his words, "it's not about 'sick care', it's about 'healthcare'."
Building Vim Connect
Vim opened its platform to other software makers through Vim Connect and an app marketplace inside the EHR. He argues that the bottleneck for value-based care and AI tools is the clinician's workflow: "Providers don't need more data or more tools. They need a way to turn insights into action inside their existing workflows."