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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Motz Feinberg on Transforming Supply Chain at Cedars-Sinai Health System
00:15:16
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- [00:00]
A
This is Laura Darda with the Beckers Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Mads Feinberg, Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer at Cedars Sinai Health System. Mads, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:12]
B
Pleasure. And I really appreciate the opportunity.
- [00:14]
A
Absolutely. Well, I'm looking forward to digging a little bit deeper into some of the cool things that you're doing at Cedars Sinai and, you know, learning your perspective on the future as well. But before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and Cedar Sinai?
- [00:29]
B
Sure. I've been with Cedars for a little over five years, leading a supply chain transformation across our health system. We have an evolving health system, fairly new and still growing, still learning how to operate truly as a health system. And we've had some great progress in the supply chain space. We do operate as a shared service now and made some really good contributions and value adds across the health system. Prior to Cedars, I was with a large national IDN for about seven years, and then prior to that, I worked in a number of different industries outside of healthcare. Anything from CPG to manufacturing to consulting and high tech as well. So lots of different perspectives.
- [01:25]
A
Well, that's great to hear. And, you know, definitely having that type of background and bringing into healthcare is really beneficial. Now, I'm curious, think about the last year or so. Can you tell us about the most important initiative that you led? What did you do and what were the results?
- [01:39]
B
Probably the most important has been just our leverage of technology and seeing how that can help our people. There's been a lot of work in the AI space, as I'm sure everyone's been diving into it. But the really important part is understanding how that can help our people be more productive, be less stressed, and be able to handle, you know, the fluctuating and kind of growing demands on them in a more flexible way and more meaningful way and in a way that that really helps them feel that they're adding value. And so it wasn't a particular project, but it's something that we tried to weave throughout a lot of different activities across supply chain.
- [02:25]
A
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And, you know, I know technology is becoming more integrated overall within healthcare and particularly looking at AI. I'm curious, as you were going through this process of bringing more into the organization and integrating it and becoming more productive as well, were there any things you learned throughout that process that would help other organizations who are, you know, in the same boat or, I guess, ways that you were able to ensure that cultural shift as well, in addition to adding the technology?
- [02:55]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, one basic thing is to, to just try it out and, and use it and show folks that, that you use it yourself as a leader. I use it every day and, and it helps people at least get over the barrier of hey, this is something that is a threat to me versus this is something that can help me grow and help me, help me be more efficient, help me be more productive and focused on higher value activities. So I started just with that and just getting more people excited about what you can do with it. The next thing that we embarked on is really trying to apply AI in very fundamental functions within supply chain. So for example, we're setting up bots to read contracts and decipher them and pull information from those contracts like payment terms or, or various other information that we want to compare either across contracts, across suppliers, across entities, or even compare what's on a contract versus what's in our ERP system. So really let it do some of the heavy lift that nobody enjoys doing in supply chain. Very tedious, very time consuming. And so we're, we're applying AI there as kind of a baseline. But then in parallel we really went and listened to our customers and what are some things that supply chain can do better? And one of those that we found from many of our customers within the hospitals is just sharing information about what's going on in supply chain. And it's not so much just strategic information, it's more tactical because if, you know, if a nurse is out of a supply, they want to know where that supply is, if any is coming, is it on an ongoing backorder, are there substitutes, etc. And, and how else can they get that product or that or something similar to it? And as you can imagine, when you're managing thousands and thousands of supplies within a hospital, knowing who to ask and, and ensuring that person has all the answers is pretty challenging. It's been a challenge in healthcare, I think since, since supply chain started, kind of, since hospital started, that you have a lot of products with a lot of information but very difficult to get to those. And so that, that was really kind of the, the overarching ask from nursing is where's my stuff? You know, where, where is it? Why don't I have it here? And we've typically tried to handle that through telephone calls and, and people answering and trying to keep up with all the requests. And we get hundreds of requests. And one of our very large hospitals we just get a lot of volume there. And so we, we partnered with our IT organization and built a tool, an AI agent, basically, that can answer all those questions, can even answer questions about products that are asked of it that don't have a part number. Right. That's just, you know, Christmas tree, for example. So that's a term nurses use for certain type of product. It can recognize that tell the nurse where it is on the floor or in another floor, tell the nurse if it's backordered, whether there's a PO out for it or whether we have it in our warehouse. And then directly the nurse can just ask the AI agent to request the product. And so it really streamlines all those communications tremendously, makes life much, much easier for nursing. And then it also provides very organized and kind of ERP like information back to supply chain. So we're not having to call the nurses and ask them what do they actually want, because the, the agent is doing all that translation for us. So, so we've combined that into our workflows and, you know, we're, we're in pilot phase. It's going very well. But that's, that's a very exciting AI adventure that we've been on internally. We're also linking it with some external partnerships as well, with some key supplier partners that we're working on again to kind of expand and scale the knowledge base that we're able to then provide back to nursing.
- [07:20]
A
I hear that it's so helpful to understand the process behind what you've been able to do with that technology and being able to build the AI conversationally. It's just incredible to think about what opportunities that affords and how you can grow more quickly with it. Now I'm curious, looking ahead for 2026, what are some of the big priorities and headwinds that you're thinking about?
- [07:45]
B
So in terms of headwinds, we're based in California. So aside from the kind of the national financial headwinds that most healthcare organizations are facing, there's some additional layers onto that in California. We recently started the Office of Healthcare Affordability in California at the state level, similar, I think, to what Massachusetts has had for a number of years. That will introduce some financial challenges and as well as seismic regulations that are coming due in California which require hospitals to be at certain seismic readiness levels from a construction perspective, which requires tremendous construction investment in California. So that's kind of layered on top of the kind of the federal challenges that everyone's dealing with. And, you know, to address those you know, we're coming from a position of strength at this point and looking at ways to proactively find ways to improve our revenue side, improve our cost controls and efficiency side of the operations. And so those are some of the major areas that everyone in the organization is involved with. Certainly supply chain, on the expense piece, on the utilization piece, working closely with our clinicians and physician partners, looking for ways to streamline that process as well as streamline our portfolio as much as we can. So those are some major elements for the coming year. We're also undergoing tremendous amount of construction, not just for seismic, but also just to upgrade a number of our facilities, as well as to help grow our capacity to address the community needs. We're regularly running over our capacity in our hospitals because we just, we've just kind of our. The demand's outgrown what we have available. So tremendous amount of construction. We're opening a new hospital this year as well, and that's keeping a lot of us very busy as well. You can imagine, supply chain kind of touches any sort of new build, new construction. We have to be there and make sure everyone's got the supplies they need to keep the place running.
- [10:26]
A
That makes a lot of sense, and you know, it. Certainly supply chain is a huge part of healthcare, and having it run smoothly makes all the difference. When you think about clinical outcomes, operational efficiencies, financials, everything else is so intimately tied to everything that's happening within the healthcare system. I'm curious, when you think about all those different things you just mentioned, what will be the hardest thing you have to do in the next year? What will that be?
- [10:51]
B
So, you know, kind of tied to the, how you mentioned, supply chain used to be everywhere. I like to, to compare supply chain to blood in the body. We, we need to be everywhere and make sure everything is, is, you know, every cell gets, gets the supplies it needs or the oxygen or nutrition it needs through the blood. And generally, people don't think a lot about supply chain until there's a problem similar to your blood. You don't really think about it until you're cutting right. And, and, and so as you look across that portfolio of activities and there are many others I didn't mention, I think one of our challenges is going to be to balance that and to balance that with kind of my initial thoughts around our people and how our people are able to handle all these different pushes and pulls for their time, for their, for their mind, for their hearts, and make sure that we're resourced appropriately as well, and people are getting the support they need to be able to be that flow and that blood that ensures all these different things happen on time to support the various initiatives and activities and openings across our health system.
- [12:11]
A
That makes a lot of sense. And I love that analogy of the supply chain being like the blood. And when you think about being able to have supply chain working functionally and operationally as efficiently as possible, but also knowing, you know, that there are certain challenges with that, whether it's supply chain shortages or potential increased costs and all of these kinds of things, is there anything you're doing differently or think you'll need to approach differently just because of the moment we're in, in healthcare and in the world?
- [12:44]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I think again, Cedars Sinai Health System has a tremendous collaborative culture. And I think what we will need to do even more of is figure out how we collaborate towards some fairly near term goals and objectives and still ensure the world class patient care that we, that we owe our communities, that we're known for while driving those. And the only way we can do that is with the right clinical integration, the right clinical partnerships, and similarly the like, the right vendor partner relationships and partnerships so that as, as kind of a joint team, we can move the organization forward. So we, we've done a lot of that and that's what's gotten us to where we are today. I think we will have to redouble our efforts and refocus our kind of, our hearts and minds on how we do that even better and more efficiently as we tackle the coming year.
- [13:52]
A
Got it. That's helpful to know. Now, before we wrap up here, I wanted to talk about growth. Are there any other opportunities you're seeing for organizational growth going forward?
- [14:01]
B
As I mentioned in the beginning, we are continuing to grow. You know, I can't really share too many details of that, but we are looking at additional ways for access for our patients. We do have a new hospital opening at the end of this calendar just in about a year from now, a little bit less. And it's all about access and making sure that the communities we serve are able to get the service they deserve. So I think that's mainly where we're seeing our growth is just areas of opportunity to gain, you know, to provide more access to our patients. Again, some of that is just construction, organic construction. Some of that is just expanding our footprint.
- [14:46]
A
That makes a lot of sense. Mads, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation. I've learned a lot from you and definitely appreciate your perspective on how things are growing and evolving. And, you know, to that point, I'm looking forward to seeing you at our annual meeting as well. I know you'll be speaking on a panel and we'll dig deeper into some of the themes we talked about today. So I'm looking forward to it. And see you in April.
- [15:08]
B
See you then. Super excited. And again, really appreciate the opportunity here, Laura.