Israel's Innovation Authority and Ministry of Health have launched a first-of-its-kind healthcare AI regulatory sandbox that pairs financial support with active regulatory guidance, letting startups test advanced and autonomous medical AI directly inside Israeli hospitals under a controlled framework announced this week.
What the sandbox covers
The program targets AI technologies that go beyond decision support — medical systems with high levels of automation, generative AI applications in care delivery, and solutions that transform clinical workflows and task allocation. Applicants must partner with an Israeli pilot site and receive up to 66% of budget for industrial corporations or 80% for academic commercialization companies. The Innovation Authority says the goal is to "break new ground" while surfacing the regulatory challenges that autonomous care creates.
Three real pilots already running
The first cohort is already testing in the wild. Plessanmore is piloting an at-home ultrasound platform at Beilinson Medical Center that aims to run routine pregnancy scans autonomously. Cordio Medical is trialing a voice-analysis-based heart-failure management system at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, combining patient voice biomarkers with clinical data to detect deterioration and adjust treatment under preset protocols. Simhawk is running trials at Hadassah in Jerusalem on AI-guided fetal weight assessment that can be operated by non-specialist staff.
A national wager on autonomous care
Israel is one of the first countries to formally sanction hospital-scale trials of autonomous medical AI, joining a small group including the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and the United Kingdom's MHRA AI Airlock. The country is under pressure to solve chronic clinician shortages, and the program is explicitly designed to test whether autonomous systems can safely take over routine tasks like scan acquisition, monitoring and triage. The scheme dovetails with the broader push by clinical AI vendors to demonstrate that agentic systems can operate reliably in high-stakes medical environments.
What to watch
Applications for the next cohort close on April 14, 2026 for the current round, with decisions expected by the end of June. Foreign investors are watching closely because the sandbox both accelerates commercial validation and produces regulatory precedent that non-Israeli regulators — from the FDA to Europe's MDR — are likely to reference as they grapple with generative and autonomous clinical systems.
Reporting based on coverage from JNS, the Israel Innovation Authority's Call for Proposals and Digital Health Israel.