Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is a 919-bed teaching hospital and research center in Los Angeles, California.

It is part of the Cedars-Sinai Health System, which includes other hospitals and a network of local doctors' offices that display its name along with a number of research institutes.

The hospital is certified as a Level I trauma center. As a teaching hospital, it is affiliated with the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It has a staff of over 2,000 physicians and 10,000 employees, supported by 2,000 volunteers and more than 40 community groups.

Its research institutes focus on biomedical research and technologically advanced medical education. The academic enterprise at Cedars-Sinai has research centers covering cardiovascular, genetics, gene therapy, gastroenterology, neuroscience, immunology, surgery, organ transplantation, stem cells, biomedical imaging, and cancer, with more than 500 clinical trials and 900 research projects currently underway (led by 230 principal investigators).

History

thumb|text-top|Entrance to old Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, 1956. The same building is now owned by the [[Church of Scientology.]]

thumb|text-top|right|Cedars of Lebanon Hospital Hollywood

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. She was one of Los Angeles’ first women doctors.

In 1930, the hospital moved to a new building in Hollywood and changed its name to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and reputed to have medicinal properties.

Mount Sinai Hospital

thumb|Cedars of Lebanon Art Deco grillwork.

The Bikur Cholim Society, named for the Talmudic obligation to care for the sick, opened a hospice In 1923 that became Mount Sinai Home for the Incurables. It was renamed Mount Sinai Hospital in 1926 and moved to a 50-bed facility on Bonnie Beach Place in Los Angeles. In 1955, it moved to Beverly Boulevard, now the location of Cedars-Sinai.

Merger of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital

Discussions to merge Cedars of Lebanon and Mount Sinai began in the 1960s. Population growth in Los Angeles, along with the opportunity to expand free care, research and medical education required a larger patient base and expanded facilities.

The merger process, led by Irving Feintech and Steven Broidy Sr., led to groundbreaking in 1972 for a 1.6-million-square-foot medical center. It received its first patients in 1976. The new hospital was designed jointly by Albert C. Martin & Associates and Charles Luckman Associates. The main contractor was Robert E. McKee, Inc.

The merged hospital retained its Jewish identity, including a mezuzah at the entrance to each room, a kosher kitchen offering meal options to patients and visitors, a sabbath elevator and a full-time Jewish chaplain. 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.

Rankings

In the 2025 U.S. News & World Report Best Hospital Rankings, Cedars-Sinai placed first in California and Los Angeles, and was nationally ranked in 11 adult specialties. The hospital was rated high-performing in 20 adult procedures and conditions. Newsweek and Statista recognized Cedars-Sinai as 34th globally in their 2025 World’s Best Hospitals ranking.

{| class="wikitable"

|-

!Adult specialties (2025)

!U.S. News & World Report national rankings

|-

|Gastroenterology and GI surgery

|2

|-

|Orthopaedics

|5

|-

|Pulmonology and lung surgery

|5

|-

|Cardiology heart and vascular surgery

|6

|-

|Obstetrics and gynecology

|8

|-

|Diabetes and endocrinology

|9

|-

|Geriatrics

|16

|-

|Cancer

|18

|-

|Neurology and neurosurgery

|18

|-

|Urology

|33

|-

|Ear, nose, and throat (otolaryngology)

|38

|}

Research

thumb|Cedars-Sinai Los Angeles, Mark Goodson Building (2024)

In fiscal year 2021, Cedars-Sinai received $93 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

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.

The school offers programs at the Master's and Doctoral levels.

  • 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

Investigations

Quaid twins overdose

In 2008, the twin daughters of actor Dennis Quaid were born prematurely and cared for at Cedars. They were accidentally given the wrong version of the blood thinner heparin, which had 1000 times the strength of the version intended. The twins survived.

The news was leaked to the website TMZ, which published it before Quaid's extended family learned of it. The hospital promised an investigation into the leak. The resulting malpractice claim was settled out of court, and included a commitment by Cedars to introduce electronic record keeping, bedside bar coding and computerized physician-order entry systems to improve patient safety. The hospital also implemented additional procedures for pharmacy and nursing staff.

Excess radiation during CT scans

From 2008 to 2009, 260 patients received excess radiation during CT brain perfusion scans, with the error discovered after a patient reported hair loss. The FDA and California Department of Public Health launched investigations, and Cedars-Sinai implemented stricter protocols and provided care and apologies to affected patients.

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.

The mural "Jewish Contributions to Medicine", by Terry Schoonhoven, can be seen in the Harvey Morse Auditorium.

See also

References

  • Official Cedars-Sinai website