Professional Recommendation
Jonathan Edelheit, JD, on Zeinab Arafat
Chairman and co-founder · Corporate Health & Wellness Association
BACKGROUND
Jonathan Edelheit is chairman and co-founder of the Corporate Health & Wellness Association, and has spent more than a decade in the insurance and medical-travel industries. He also co-founded the Medical Tourism Association and Global Healthcare Resources, and edits Medical Tourism Magazine.
He has known Zeinab Arafat since 2013 — thirteen years, and by a wide margin the longest professional relationship represented on this site.
FROM ZEINA
I have known Jonathan since 2013, which is longer than anyone else on this page has known me.
We met through the healthcare industry rather than through clinical work. I was working in hospital administration at the time, and he was running international conferences that bring healthcare people together. We were introduced through that world. Later, when I moved, it turned out his organisation was based near where I ended up, so we stayed in touch. Our families have been friends ever since.
Jonathan has spent his entire career around healthcare without ever working inside a treatment room — the insurance side, the industry side, the part of it that decides what care people can actually get to. He meets more clinicians in a year than most clinicians meet in a lifetime, which is what makes what he wrote unusual to me.
Thirteen years is a long time. He has known me through every version of myself, and I did not expect the letter he sent.
THE LETTER
I have met thousands of clinicians, doctors and nurses. I trust very few of them with my own family. Zeinab Arafat is one of them.
I have known Zeinab since 2013 and watched her grow into the provider and leader she is today.
I respect not only her skill but how she treats people.
She is kind and communicative in a way that has become rare in medicine, and she is genuinely helpful, the sort of provider who makes a patient feel steadier the moment she walks in.
Jonathan Edelheit, JDCorporate Health & Wellness Association
Signed original held on file. Signature and contact details are not published, and the letter itself is not published. One sentence break is repaired in the first quotation above. No word is added or removed. It comes down the same day if its author asks — see privacy.
WHAT IT DEMONSTRATES
Thirteen years of watching the same person, by somebody who meets thousands. Healthcare Leadership.