Cedars-Sinai

Cedars-Sinai

Cedars-Sinai Health System Defined Benefit Retirement Plan was established in 1957 to provide retirement, disability, and death benefits to employees of the medical center and its affiliated medical care foundation. The plan falls under the broader Cedars-Sinai health system, headquartered in Los Angeles, and is overseen by an investment board chaired by David Kaplan, co-founder of Ares Management. Vice Chair Steven Romick is managing partner at First Pacific Advisors, and board member Jay Wintrob serves as CEO of Oaktree Capital Management — embedding influential credit-market operators directly into the governance of a hospital pension fund. The plan's stated strategy emphasizes distressed debt, a focus that aligns with the credit-heavy expertise of its board leadership. The investment office, first formalized under inaugural CIO Pasy Wang, manages an asset base Altss estimates at approximately $751M. The portfolio's composition is not publicly itemized, but the distressed-debt mandate suggests allocations to credit special situations, possibly through funds managed by firms linked to its directors. Separately, the health system runs Cedars-Sinai Intellectual Property Company, led by James Laur, which directly commercializes medical technologies developed at the hospital — a venture operation adjacent to but distinct from the pension fund. Beyond the pension pool, the Cedars-Sinai system controls a significant real estate footprint across Los Angeles, including the main medical campus on Beverly Boulevard, the Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion, multiple medical office towers, and Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey Hospital. The system's art collection is distributed across these facilities. Board members and investment leadership have ties to professional networks including YPO and Tiger 21, though the pension fund's own staffing and operating metrics remain undisclosed. The Cedars-Sinai structure is unusual: a single hospital system's retirement plan governed by a board drawn from the top tier of Los Angeles distressed-credit and high-yield investors. That concentration of credit expertise in a pension governance role, paired with a separate technology-commercialization subsidiary, creates parallel institutional capabilities — investment management built by allocators who are themselves major fund managers, and a captive innovation pipeline converting hospital R&D into licensable assets.