Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

History

Cedars of Lebanon Hospital

Kaspare Cohn Hospital was founded in 1902, named for its major donor, a Jewish businessman who later founded the bank that became Union Bank & Trust Company and is now part of U.S. Bancorp. The hospital's first superintendent, Sarah Vasen, was a graduate of the University of Iowa Medical School who had been the superintendent and obstetrician for the Jewish Maternity Home in Philadelphia.

The hospital was intended to serve both the Jewish community and the patients of Jewish doctors, who were denied admitting privileges in other hospitals because of discrimination.

In 1930, the hospital moved to a new building in Hollywood and changed its name to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, after the trees mentioned frequently in Scripture and reputed to have medicinal properties.{{cite web |last1=Kramer |first1=Howard |title=CEDAR GROVES OF LEBANON |url=https://thecompletepilgrim.com/cedar-groves-lebanon/ |website=The Complete Pilgrim |access-date=2 January 2026 |date=12 August 2014|quote=The trade in cedar wood permeated the Mediterranean world....When the Israelites arrived, it became prized for medicinal and religious purposes.

Mount Sinai Hospital

Meanwhile, in 1918, the Bikur Cholim Society opened a two-room hospice, the Bikur Cholim Hospice, when the Great Influenza Pandemic hit the United States of America. In 1921, the hospice relocated to an eight-bed facility in Boyle Heights and was renamed Bikur Cholim Hospital. On November 7, 1926, it was renamed Mount Sinai Hospital and moved to a 50-bed facility on Bonnie Beach Place in Los Angeles. Later, in 1950, a new Mount Sinai Hospital was built on land donated by Emma and Hyman Levine at 8700 Beverly Boulevard. They had purchased 3.5 acres of land and donated the property to Mount Sinai Hospital under the auspices of their foundation.

Merger of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital

Cedars of Lebanon and Mount Sinai hospitals merged in 1961 to form Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The unification of both hospitals was made necessary by population growth and modern medical progress. A donation of $4 million by the Max Factor Family Foundation allowed the construction of the main hospital building, which broke ground on November 5, 1972, and opened on April 3, 1976. The new hospital was designed jointly by Albert C. Martin & Associates and Charles Luckman Associates. The main contractor was Robert E. McKee, Inc. While the main hospital buildings were being built the Thalians Mental Health Center also designed by Martin and Luckman was being constructed. The main contractor was the Del E. Webb Corporation, and the Thalians Center was completed in 1973.

In 1994, the Cedars-Sinai Health System was established, constituting the Cedars-Sinai Medical Care Foundation, the Burns and Allen Research Institute, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The Burns and Allen Research Institute, named for George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, is located inside the Barbara and Marvin Davis Research Building. Opened in 1996, it houses biomedical research aimed at discovering genetic, molecular and immunological factors that trigger disease.

In 2006, Cedars-Sinai added the Saperstein Critical Care Tower with 150 ICU beds.

, Cedars-Sinai served 54,947 inpatients, 350,405 outpatients, and 77,964 visits to the emergency room. Cedars-Sinai received high rankings in 11 of the 16 specialties, ranking in the top 10 for digestive disorders and in the top 25 for five other specialties as listed below.

In 2013, Cedars-Sinai opened its 800,000-square-foot Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion, which consists of eight stories of program space located over a six-story parking structure, on the eastern edge of its campus at the corner of San Vicente Boulevard and Gracie Allen Drive. Designed by the architectural firm Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, the pavilion brings patient care and translational research together in one site. The Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion houses the Cedars-Sinai's neurosciences programs, the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and Regenerative Medicine Institute laboratories, as well as outpatient surgery suites, an imaging area, and an education center.

George W. Schaeffer and Irina Schaeffer, who donated $20 million to the Smidt Heart Institute, were one of their most substantial philanthropic contributors.

Rankings

In 2022–23, U.S News ranked Cedars-Sinai the best hospital in California ahead of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which topped the 2021–22 rankings, and second-best in the United States behind Mayo Clinic. Cedars-Sinai ranked as follows in adult medical specialties in the nationwide U.S. News Best Hospitals 2022–23 report:{{cite web | title = Cedars-Sinai Medical Center | year = 2022 | publisher = U.S. News & World Report | url = https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/ca/cedars-sinai-medical-center-6930444 | access-date = 2022-07-26}}

Cedars-Sinai ranked as follows in the 2009 Los Angeles area residents' "Most Preferred Hospital for All Health Needs" ranking:

Worth selected Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute as one of the United States' Top-25 Hospitals for Cardiac Bypass Surgery.

Cedars-Sinai's Gynecologic Oncology Division was named among the nation's Top 10 Clinical Centers of Excellence by Contemporary OB/GYN in 2009.

Research

Cedars-Sinai is one of the leading institutes for competitive research funding from the National Institutes of Health. As an international leader in biomedical research, it translates discoveries into successful treatments with global impact. Cedars-Sinai investigators pair basic scientific research in areas of stem cell biology, immunology, neuroscience, and genetics, with clinical and translational discoveries, to continue advancing medical breakthroughs. Total research expenditure in 2020–21 was $252 million. In fiscal year 2021, Cedars-Sinai received $93 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Some notable research areas and organized research units at Cedars-Sinai are:

• Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
• Biomanufacturing Center
• Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Research Center
• Cancer Research
• Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics
• Center for Cardiac Arrest Prevention
• Center for Integrated Research in Cancer and Lifestyle
• Center for Neural Science and Medicine
• Center for Outcomes Research and Education
• Center for Space Medicine Research
• Diabetes and Obesity Research
• Digestive Diseases Research
• Division of Informatics
• Endocrinology Research
• Genetics and Genomics Research
• Heart Research
• Imaging Research
• Immunology and Infectious Diseases Research
• Medically Associated Science and Technology
• Neurosciences Research
• Pulmonary Research
• Regenerative Medicine Institute
• Stem Cell Research
• Surgery Research
• Women's Health Research

Cedars-Sinai Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences

The Cedars-Sinai Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (formerly known as Cedars-Sinai's Graduate Research Education division), established in 2008, is a graduate college at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. It offers PhD and Master's programs in Biomedical Sciences and healthcare fields. There are more than 100 faculty, and over 150 enrollment; the Dean is Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, FRCP, MACP.

The school offers programs at the Master's and Doctoral levels. Didactic lectures are conducted at the Pacific Design Center while research is conducted at the medical center, specifically at the Burns and Allen Research Institute (named for George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen), which is located inside the Barbara and Marvin Davis Research Building on Cedars-Sinai campus. Opened in 1996, it houses biomedical research aimed at discovering genetic, molecular and immunological factors that trigger disease. In 2013 new research labs were created, when Cedars-Sinai opened its 800,000-square-foot Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion, which consists of eight stories of program space located over a six-story parking structure, on the eastern edge of its campus at the corner of San Vicente Boulevard and Gracie Allen Drive. Designed by the architectural firm Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, the pavilion brings patient care and translational research together in one site. The Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion houses the Cedars-Sinai's neurosciences programs, the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and Regenerative Medicine Institute laboratories, as well as outpatient surgery suites, an imaging area, and an education center.

PhD Program:

• Biomedical Sciences

Master's Programs:

• Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
• Health Delivery Science
• Regenerative Medicine

Professional Training Programs:

• Postdoctoral Scientist Program
• Clinical Scholars Program
• Research Internship Program

Notable staff

• Keith Black, Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery and Director of the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute, has performed over 4,000 brain surgeries and has made significant medical advances relating to neurosurgery.
• George Berci, oldest surgeon
• Bruce Gewertz, Surgeon-in-Chief, Chair of the Department of Surgery, Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs and Vice-President for Interventional Services.
• Elsie Giorgi, former head of clinics
• David Ho was a resident at Cedars-Sinai when he encountered some of the first cases of what was later labeled AIDS.
• Calvin Johnson, Professor of Anesthesiology
• Verne Mason, internist and chairman of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's medical advisory committee. Mason gave the disease sickle cell anemia its name.
• Jason H. Moore, Chair of the Department of Computational Biomedicine and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education (CAIRE)
• David Rimoin, chair of Pediatrics for 18 years, specialized in genetics and was a pioneer researcher in dwarfism and skeletal dysplasia. Together with Michael Kaback, he discovered the enzyme screening for Tay-Sachs disease, reducing the incidence of the deadly disease by 90 percent.
• Karine Sargsyan, physician, geneticist, and foresight scientist
• William Shell was a director of Cardiac Rehabilitation at Cedars-Sinai.
• Esther Somerfeld-Ziskind, a neurologist and psychiatrist who was chair of the Department of Psychiatry.
• Adam Springfield, who acted on the PBS series Wishbone, is now a Labor and Delivery scheduler.
• Jeremy Swan co-invented the pulmonary artery catheter together with William Ganz while at Cedars-Sinai.
• Nicholas Tatonetti, associate director of computational oncology in the cancer center.
• Neal ElAttrache, orthopedic surgeon

Controversy

In 2008, state regulators found that Cedars-Sinai had placed the Quaid twins and others in immediate jeopardy by its improper handling of blood-thinning medication.

According to articles in the Los Angeles Times in 2009, Cedars-Sinai was under investigation for significant radiation overdoses of 206 patients during CT brain perfusion scans during a period of 18 months. Since the initial investigation, it was found that GE sold several products to various medical centers with faulty radiation monitoring devices.

In 2011, Cedars-Sinai again created controversy by denying a liver transplant to medical marijuana patient Norman Smith. They removed Mr. Smith from a transplant waiting list for "non-compliance of our substance abuse contract", despite his own oncologist at Cedars-Sinai having recommended that he use the marijuana for his pain and chemotherapy. Dr. Steven D. Colquhoun, director of the Liver Transplant Program, said that the hospital "must consider issues of substance abuse seriously", but the transplant center did not seriously consider whether Mr. Smith was "using" marijuana versus "abusing" it. In 2012, Cedars-Sinai denied a liver transplant to a second patient, Toni Trujillo, after her Cedars-Sinai doctors knew and approved of her legal use of medical marijuana. In both cases, the patients acceded to the hospital's demand and stopped using medical marijuana, despite its therapeutic benefits for them, but were both sent back to the bottom of the transplant list. Smith's death led Americans for Safe Access to lobby for the California Medical Cannabis Organ Transplant Act (AB 258), which was enacted in July 2015 to prevent patients who use marijuana from being denied organ transplants.

Patient data security breaches

On June 18 through June 24, 2013, six employees were terminated for inappropriately accessing 14 patient records around the time Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's daughter was born at the hospital. On June 23, 2014, an unencrypted employee laptop was stolen from an employee's home. The laptop contained patient Social Security numbers and patient health data.

Art collection

First developed by philanthropists Frederick and Marcia Weisman, Cedars-Sinai's modern and contemporary art collection dates to 1976 and includes more than 4,000 original paintings, sculptures, new media installations and limited-edition prints by the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Claes Oldenburg, Willem de Kooning, Raymond Pettibon and Pablo Picasso. At any given time, 90 to 95 percent of the collection is on display. Nine large-scale works are located in courtyards, parking lots, and public walkways throughout the approximately 30-acre campus. The collection consists entirely of gifts from donors, other institutions, and occasionally the artists themselves.

There is a statue of Moses in the parking lot. However, the two tablets of the covenant that, according to the story, Moses received at Mount Sinai, are blank on the statue. This led many people to ask, "Why is Moses in the parking lot?" In response, the director of community engagement, Jonathan Schreiber, has given a brief lecture explaining the history of the statue's role in the hospital merger.

References

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