Cedars Sinai Medical Center

History

Founded and financed by businessman Kaspare Cohn, Cedars-Sinai was established as the Kaspare Cohn Hospital in 1902. At the time, Cohn donated a two-story Victorian home at 1441 Carroll Avenue in the Angeleno Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles to the Hebrew Benevolent Society to create the hospital as a memorial to his brother Samuel. The hospital had just 12 beds when it opened on September 21, 1902, and its services were initially free.

From 1906 to 1910, Dr. Sarah Vasen, the first female doctor in Los Angeles, acted as superintendent. In 1910, the hospital relocated and expanded to Stephenson Avenue (now Whittier Boulevard), where it had 50 beds and a backhouse containing a 10-cot tubercular ward. It gradually transformed from a charity-based hospital to a general hospital and began to charge patients.

The hospital relocated again in 1930 to 4833 Fountain Avenue, where it was renamed Cedars of Lebanon after the religiously significant Lebanon Cedars, which were used to build King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in the Bible. Cedars of Lebanon could accommodate 279 patients.

In 1918, the Bikur Cholim Society opened a second Jewish hospital, the Bikur Cholim Hospice, when the Great Influenza Pandemic hit America. In 1921, the hospice relocated to an eight-bed facility in Boyle Heights and was renamed Bikur Cholim Hospital. In 1923 the Bikur Cholim Hospital became Mount Sinai Home for the Incurables.

On November 7, 1926, a newly named Mount Sinai Hospital moved to a 50-bed facility on Bonnie Beach Place. In 1950, Emma and Hyman Levine donated their property adjacent to Beverly Hills, and by 1955 the construction completed and Mount Sinai Hospital opened at 8700 Beverly Boulevard (now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center). The original building stood until 1994, when it was damaged in the Northridge earthquake. Cedars of Lebanon and Mount Sinai Hospitals merged in 1961 to form Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Donations from the Max Factor Family Foundation allowed the construction of the current main hospital building, which broke ground on November 5, 1972, and opened on April 3, 1976.

In 1994, the Cedars-Sinai Health System was established, comprising 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.

In 2008, Cedars-Sinai served 54,947 inpatients and 350,405 outpatients, and there were 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 architectural firm HOK, 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.

Rankings

Cedars-Sinai ranks as follows in the nationwide U.S. News Best Hospitals 2013–14 report:

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

In 2013, Cedars-Sinai Hospital was ranked in 12 specialties by U.S. News & World Report.

Worth Magazine selected Cedars-Sinai 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.

Notable Staff

Notable Deaths

Notable Births

Crown Prince Pavlos and Marie-Chantal , Crown Princess of Greece Son Aristidis-Stavros was born in 29 June 2008 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center .

Amarcian actress Molly Sims and Scott Stuber's elder son Brooks Alan Stuber was born in 19 June 2012 at Cedars Sinai Medical Medical Center.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West second child and son Saint West was born in 5 December 2015 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center .

Victoria Beckham and David Beckham's daughter Harper Seven Beckham was born in 10 July 2011 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center

Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna's daughter, Dream Renee Kardashian, was born on November 10, 2016, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center

Controversy

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 an 18-month period. Since the initial investigation, it was found that GE sold several products to various medical centers with faulty radiation monitoring devices.

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

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 six years back to the bottom of the transplant list. Mr. Smith's liver cancer returned after Cedars-Sinai refused to replace his liver, and he died in July 2012. His death inspired Americans for Safe Access to lobby for the California Medical Cannabis Organ Transplant Act (AB 258), which was enacted in July 2015 to protect future patients from dying at the hands of medical establishments prejudiced against the legal use of medical cannabis.

Patient data security breaches

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. 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.

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. Ninety to 95 percent of the collection is on display at any given time. 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.