Alen Voskanian, MD, MBA, FACHE, Chief Operating Officer and Vice President at Cedars-Sinai Medical Network

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Becker’s Healthcare Podcast

Guest: Dr. Alen Voskanian, COO & Vice President, Cedars-Sinai Medical Network
Host: Laura Dearda
Date: August 30, 2025
Length: ~18 min (content only)

---

Episode Overview

This episode centers on the operational innovations and leadership philosophy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Network, particularly focusing on the evolution of its physician-operations dyad leadership model, efforts to improve patient access to care, the integration of technology and AI, and strategies for building a resilient healthcare organization in the changing landscape.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Dr. Voskanian’s Background and Cedars-Sinai Overview

• Introduction to Role and Journey
  • Physician by training, still sees patients to stay connected with frontline issues.
    • “I always make time to see patients because I think as a physician leader, it gives me an opportunity to have my fingers on the pulse of what our physicians are experiencing.” [01:13]
  • Moved into leadership after realizing the impact of operational improvements, earned an MBA.
  • Cedars-Sinai Medical Network: rapid geographic and operational growth, foundation model, multi-specialty group, dominant primary care footprint across Los Angeles.

Physician-Operational Dyad Leadership Model

• Development and Impact

  • The model pairs each operational leader with a physician counterpart at every leadership level.
  • Aims to bridge common divides between clinical and administrative teams:
    • “Often the source of that conflict is when clinicians…feel like they do not have a voice in how operations are running. In my opinion, having a truly kind of well developed and a strong dyad leadership model helps in addressing those conflicts.” [03:56]
  • Benefits realized in clinician wellness, access improvement, and reducing burnout.

• Lessons Learned in Implementation

  • Right People: Must be collaborative, servant leaders, willing to focus on mutual goals.
  • Goal Alignment: Both dyads—including physicians—are educated on and accountable for budgets and key performance indicators.
    • “Now both dyads carry their department's budget target. That's just one example of creating alignment.” [07:47]
  • Training: Intensive education on lean methodologies and continuous improvement ­(“A3”/root cause analysis) to create shared understanding and process language.
  • Trust and Autonomy: Empower dyad pairs to innovate and problem-solve at the department level with minimal escalations.
    • “To truly rely on the system, you need to trust the dyad pair.” [09:18]

Top Strategic Issues for Cedars-Sinai

• 1. Patient Access to Care

  • Access is the dominant challenge—both technologically and operationally.

    • “Access is, I look at access from a patient centered lens. And access is when a patient wants to get care at a specific time, can they get that care at that specific time?” [10:43]

  • Patient expectations now shaped by other industries (e.g., booking restaurants, movies online).

  • Barriers include:

    • Scheduling difficulties (phone and digital)
    • Limited clinician availability
    • Historical constraints of office hours not matching patient needs
    • Long specialist wait times impacting care outcomes

  • Approach to Access Improvement:

    • Initial focus: building actionable data sets, dashboards, and KPIs to measure access.
    • Current phase: operationalizing improvement initiatives, setting targets, leveraging dyad teams for accountability and innovation.
    • “Access is such a big challenge that it cannot be fixed overnight. It's a journey that will take a few years. But I'm so excited that we are kind of in the middle of that journey.” [14:02]

Future Growth and Opportunities

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Technology:
  • AI will enhance—not replace—physicians by reducing administrative burdens and improving clinical focus.
    • “AI will add value in a way that will allow physicians to spend more time with their patients.” [15:13]
  • Examples:
    • Ambient listening/scribe devices: generate visit notes during patient encounters, freeing clinicians from documentation.
      • “When physicians...use ambient devices for their visits, they often rave about...being able to actually make eye contact with their patients and be fully present during that visit, and also the amount of time it saves for them with documentation after the visit.” [16:00]
    • Virtual care teams: using AI to pre-gather information for virtual visits, streamlining workflows and expanding reach.
      • “A patient engages with AI, answers questions, the AI creates a summary of that. So then when the physician is seeing the patient, they already have a summary and...provide the care virtually.” [17:00]
  • Virtual and remote care seen as vital to solving the access challenge nationwide.

Leading Healthcare Organizations into the Future

• What It Takes to Thrive:
  • Unwavering focus on patient care as the core mission—“our true north.”
  • Balancing quality care and patient experience with operational efficiency and resource constraints.
    • “Organizations that are able to manage the financial challenges...and provide excellent, great, high quality, high experience care with less resources...are going to be thriving...” [19:00]

---

Notable Quotes

• “I always make time to see patients because I think as a physician leader, it gives me an opportunity to have my fingers on the pulse of what our physicians are experiencing.” – Dr. Voskanian, [01:13]
• “Having a truly kind of well developed and a strong dyad leadership model helps in addressing those conflicts. Because clinicians become involved in operations, they have a voice and they partner with their leadership team in addressing some of the challenges...” – Dr. Voskanian, [03:56]
• “Now both dyads carry their department's budget target. That's just one example of creating alignment.” – Dr. Voskanian, [07:47]
• “And so what keeps me up at night and what I think is one of the biggest challenges in our healthcare system, in every healthcare system, is access to care.” – Dr. Voskanian, [12:13]
• “AI will add value in a way that will allow physicians to spend more time with their patients.” – Dr. Voskanian, [15:13]
• “Organizations that are able to manage the financial challenges...and provide excellent, great, high quality, high experience care with less resources...are going to be thriving...” – Dr. Voskanian, [19:00]

---

Timestamped Highlights

• 00:42–02:45 | Dr. Voskanian’s role, career path, and Cedars-Sinai’s geographic and operational expansion
• 03:06–05:36 | Success of the dyad leadership model and its advantages
• 06:06–09:38 | Lessons learned in implementing dyad model, goal alignment, and lean training
• 10:05–14:22 | Top strategic focus: improving patient access to care and leveraging data/KPIs
• 14:56–18:03 | How AI and virtual care are transforming workflows and expanding access
• 18:32–19:48 | Essentials for organizational leadership and thriving in the next five years

---

Takeaways

This episode underscores the transformative impact of collaborative leadership structures, data-driven access strategies, and technological innovation in healthcare delivery. Dr. Voskanian presents a vision where patient-centered care, operational excellence, and purposeful adoption of AI and virtual solutions pave the way for a thriving, resilient healthcare future.

Transcript

[A]

This is Laura Dearda with the Beckers Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Alan Voskanian, who is the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Cedars Sinai Medical Network. Dr. Voskanian, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

[B]

Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm excited to be here.

[A]

Absolutely. And we're excited to have you because I know Cedars Sinai is such a unique health system in quite an amazing medical center in terms of some of the innovation you're working on in different, you're transforming care delivery. So I am excited to dig deeper. But before we get into the broader conversation, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself as well as Cedars Sinai Medical Network?

[B]

Sure. Happy to do so. I am a physician by training. I still practice medicine, but very early in my career I got very interested in improving the way we were running in our clinics and the way we were running our hospital inpatient services. So I started taking on leadership roles and I realized that there's this whole science and theory around leadership around business of health care. So I decided to get an MBA and got more involved in running operations. And about almost three years ago, I became the Chief operating officer at Cedars Sinai Medical Network. As I mentioned, I still love seeing patients and I always make time to see patients because I think as a physician leader, it gives me an opportunity to have my fingers on the pulse of what our physicians are experiencing. Cedars Sinai Medical Network has grown significantly over the last couple of years. We have about thousands physicians who are employed through various medical groups. We are a foundation model and it's a multi specialty medical group. So we have almost all the specialties. A very dominant primary care footprint across Los Angeles. Cedars Sinai has has also spread geographically. Initially, the main medical center was located in Beverly Hill, but now we cover entire almost the entire LA landscape from Torrance all the way up the coast to Santa Monica and then more east towards Pasadena and San Gabriel Valley.

[A]

That's amazing to hear. And what a huge space that you are covering in a large swath of the population there in California too. That's really, really cool to hear. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper the last year or so. What's one of your biggest wins or success stories that you can share with us?

[B]

For me, as I reflect on my time at Cedars Sinai, one of the biggest wins has been developing a physician and operational dyad leadership structure. And this over the last year this program has matured so much and we See the amazing benefits of having a true dyad leadership structure. About right prior to the pandemic, we started developing this model and I spearheaded developing our dyad leadership structure, which pairs up a physician with the operational leader at every level of our administrative leadership. So a manager will have a physician leader. A director also has a physician dyad leader, same with the vice president. And you often hear in various healthcare systems where there is often conflict between physicians or clinical teams and the leadership team. And often the source of that conflict is when clinicians, especially physicians, feel like they do not have a voice in how operations are running. In my opinion, having a truly kind of well developed and a strong dyad leadership model helps in addressing those conflicts. Because clinicians become involved in operations, they have a voice and they partner with their leadership team in addressing some of the challenges that we all face in our healthcare systems. So in the last year I've seen the benefits of this dyad leadership model as we've tackled some of the key strategies for our medical network, for example, access being one of them. And the other challenges we've been able to address are focused on just clinician wellness and well being. And how do we address some of those pebbles in the shoes of our clinicians that day in, day out they have to deal with and over long term leads to burnout lead. This dyad leadership model has made a lot of great strides in addressing some of those challenges.

[A]

That's amazing to hear. And you know, I can imagine in some ways it's easy to easier said than done to get a dyad model that works as well as you're saying. And so when you look at, you know, having put that structure in place and now been able to live in it and figure out how it, you know, works the best way possible, what have you learned along the way? How have you really seen this evolve from being idea into actualization and optimization?

[B]

Yeah, there's a lot of lessons learned. I think having the right people in the role is critical. People who are collaborative, who are open to relying on their partner in achieving what's right for our patients, for our clinicians, being selfless and really truly being a servant leader and focusing together as a dyad pair to kind of partner in a way that they can address big challenges within their departments. And the way as a leadership team we've been able to achieve that is by creating goals that are aligned between the dyad pair. So if initially, for example, our physician leaders were not carrying a budget goal, and obviously, as you can imagine, achieving the budget Targets is a big part of any administrative leader's goals. So over the last few years, slowly we started educating our physician dyads on budget and various financial metrics. And now both dyads carry their department's budget target. That's just one example of creating alignment. When both dyads are truly working towards the same goals, training is really critical. Each pair of dyad brings unique strengths to that leadership team. We are really focused on lean and kind of continuous performance improvement. So when we were setting up our dyad structures, we carved out significant amount of time to train both dyad pairs on lean methodologies and how we want to run our operations, which is really always focusing on finding opportunities for improvement, developing a robust plan. You know, we call it A three, but then we also discussed like, okay, does using, using the term A three make sense? And how, how do we, how do we kind of explain that methodology in a way that doesn't come across as a lingo, which is truly like a root cause analysis? Understanding what the sources of the problem are and how can we create a project to improve that problem? So our teams are really well versed in performance improvement lean methodologies. And the lesson learned is to align the goal to provide all the tools to the dyad pair to be successful, to also allow them the freedom to make decisions within their departments that does not always require escalations, and that sometimes the frontline clinicians and operational leaders are the best people to come up with the solutions. So to truly rely on the system, you need to trust the dyad pair.

[A]

I love that that's helpful to understand and know. And really, as you mentioned, that mutual trust and understanding of the goals aligned around each dyad pair can make a big difference in. Now, when you're thinking about your strategy, what are some of the top two to three issues that you're focused on right now? What's top of mind for you and some of these big conversations you're having around decision making for the future?

[B]

Yeah, that's a really good question for me. Always our patients come first. And how do we make sure that our patients are getting high quality care? Also getting really great experience by our clinicians, by everybody. They interact from the time they're thinking about scheduling an appointment to actually coming for that appointment. But as you can imagine, there could be a lot of barriers in having a great experience. And one of the biggest barriers currently that I think every healthcare system is facing is access to care. And access could be defined in many different ways. For me, access is, I look at access from a patient centered lens. And access is when a patient wants to get care at a specific time, can they get that care at that specific time? And the barriers people face often include sometimes technology or operational barriers like not being able to get the phone call answered or not being able to schedule their visit digitally. I think in today's world, when all of us are so used to scheduling, not scheduling, but like reserving a spot in our favorite restaurants online, or reserving our exact seat in a movie theater, there's that expectation now from healthcare system that people want to easily be able to schedule, reschedule their visit, find a time that works for them. And historically that hasn't been the focus of most healthcare systems. We've been very focused, very healthcare system focused. Meaning, you know, for example, the office clinic hours have always typically been like let's say 8 to 5. And that's the time when most patients are working or most parents are busy, they can't bring their kids to their doctor's visit. And as healthcare system we are challenged to make accommodations to meet our patients needs by being more flexible, by providing better access. And some of the challenges for access not only are technology driven, but the availability of clinicians is also very limited. So you often hear that patients have to wait for weeks or months to see a special specialist. And that's not only bad for from an experienced perspective, but it's also not good from a quality perspective or receiving care at the right time. If a patient who needs to be seen soon to be diagnosed with a serious condition is not able to come in, that could lead to poor outcomes. And so what keeps me up at night and what I think is one of the biggest challenges in our healthcare system, in every healthcare system, is access to care. So we've, a few years ago we started focusing on access. The first two years we were really focused on creating data, bringing visibility to how we were performing in terms of access. And then now that we have very good set of dashboards and KPIs for access, we are setting targets for improving access and going back to that dyad structure, they have been instrumental in setting specific goals, performance improvement targets and trying to improve access to care. And with that said, access is such a big challenge that it cannot be fixed overnight. It's a journey that will take a few years. But I'm so excited that we are kind of in the middle of that journey.

[A]

That's fantastic to hear. And I know so many organizations have similar challenges or journey they're on in figuring out how they can leverage all the resources to improve access to care and ensure their patients still have a really strong ability to receive care and within their organization. So that's amazing to hear about your journey and then really see where you've been focusing on. Now. I'm curious, when you look into the future, given everything that we've talked about already today, where are some of the big opportunities for continued growth and development in the next few years?

[B]

Yeah, I think we all hear about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and I do believe that there is a tremendous opportunity to gain value from AI. And I don't believe that AI will replace physicians. Like, you know, sometimes people talk about topics like that, will AI replace clinicians? And things like that? And I don't really believe that that to be true. What I believe will happen is that AI will add value in a way that will allow physicians to spend more time with their patients. And you know, we're already seeing some of the benefits of this. And a very specific example to give is ambient listening devices that act as a virtual scribe. When a physician is seeing a patient, they can turn on a device that after getting consent from a patient that listens to the conversation and creates a note for that visit. Now, that technology has improved tremendously over the last, even within the last year. And when physicians, when I talk to physicians who've been using ambient devices for their visits, they often rave about the benefits in terms of giving them an opportunity not to sit behind their computer screen, but be able to actually make eye contact with their patients and be fully present during that visit, and also the amount of time it saves for them with documentation after the visit. So that's just one example of using AI that has tremendous opportunity in the future. Also, one more thing that I think there's tremendous opportunity to grow is also focusing on delivering care outside the clinic walls and providing virtual care. And you know, that's another specific example as we embarked on creating a virtual team of primary care physicians that are using AI as an initial information gathering step. So a patient engages with AI, answers questions, the AI creates a summary of that. So then when the physician is seeing the patient, they already have a summary and they provide the care virtually. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for thinking outside the clinic walls and incorporating AI virtual care to be able to address some of the big access challenges that are ahead of us in United States.

[A]

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And like you said, another really big and important way an access point for patients is just that virtual opportunities and ability to connect with their clinicians in a variety of ways. So I certainly appreciate that. And when you look at all the ways that healthcare is changing, healthcare delivery and technology is bringing new opportunities as well, what do you think it will take in order to lead a thriving organization over the next five years?

[B]

I think focusing on the patients, always focusing on the patients, and realizing that healthcare is truly about caring for our patients and that should be our true north and always doing the right thing for patients. But also we know that to be able to be a thriving organization and do a great job caring for our patients, we need to have organizations that are efficient, that are able to provide more care with less resources. And that is a challenge for a lot of healthcare systems as there's uncertainty about funding and financial aspects of being a healthcare leader. So organizations that are able to manage the financial challenges that are ahead, to be able to provide excellent, great, high quality, high experience care with less resources in the future, are going to be thriving, I think, over the next five years.

[A]

I love that. That makes a lot of sense. Dr. Roscanian, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation. It's been fascinating to hear from you and I look forward to seeing you as well at our CEO CFO Roundtable coming up. I think it's such a critical time for leaders to be able to connect and really share their challenges as well as what they're doing well and continue to move the industry forward. So than and I look forward to seeing you there.

[B]

Thank you so much, Laura. I'm also looking forward to attending that conference, so I'll see you there.