Cedars-Sinai’s New AI Chief Digs Into the Data

February 12, 2025 ‐ HealthLeaders Media

By Eric Wicklund

AI may be all the rage these days, but Cedars-Sinai’s new Vice President and Chief Data and AI Officer says there’s a reason ‘data’ precedes ‘AI’ in his title.

“The fuel for AI is the data,” says Mouneer Odeh, MA, who was appointed to the new role this past December. He points out that for AI to work as intended, it has to be based on good data, and so healthcare leaders need to understand all about data management and analysis before they dig into the potential.

Ai is all about “leveraging the power of data through its full spectrum,” he says. And at its heart is the “continuum of data-driven intelligence.”

Odeh comes to Cedars-Sinai—and the West Coast—from Virginia’s Inova Health System, where he served as vice president of analytics for four years. Prior to that, he was the vice president of enterprise analytics and chief data science at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health and, before that, a director at Quest Diagnostics.

Odeh’s role is pivotal, as the healthcare industry moves to both embrace and govern the fast-moving AI landscape. Health systems and hospitals are piloting AI tools and services at a pace not seen before.

“There is a recognition that in the future, computational biomedicine will become increasingly important for both research as well as clinical care,” he says. “It’s almost like a new technology of clinical care that’s being layered on top of all the other things that we’ve done over the last 100 years.”

“It’s also so incredibly important for streamlining operations [and] for improving the experience of our caregivers, nurses and doctors, as well as for our patients.”

Getting a handle on AI means addressing many moving parts, a challenge that some health systems have assigned to a committee and others to an executive. In the press release announcing Odeh’s appointment, Cedars-Sinai officials praised him as a “change agent” with a grasp of data analytics, data science and health information, and noted that he—as the health system’s first-ever data science and AI executive—”will lead enterprise-wide efforts to harness data analytics and AI to drive innovation across care delivery and administrative functions.”

The health system sees Odeh as a facilitator, overseeing “a diverse team of professionals spanning advanced analytics, research, infrastructure, governance, data science and business intelligence” and collaborating with departments throughout the enterprise to forge a comprehensive AI policy.

Odeh says that collaboration will be important. He wants to see a health system that encourages its clinicians to use AI, but to also be comfortable and competent when they use it. That means carving out some time for them to sit back and learn.

“Our goal is to empower” clinicians to use AI responsibly, he says. “Channel that positive energy and give them a way to do it in a productive way that actually is appropriately governed, and with safeguards in place.”

That also means making sure everyone is on the same page about what AI can do and where it is going.

“We are looking to make sure we have a cohesive ecosystem so that we’re not doing one-off little AI solutions here and there,” he adds. “We’re really trying to build it in a scalable way that will allow us to deploy dozens and hundreds of use cases.”

Odeh acknowledges the hype surrounding AI, and says he understands how that can affect a health system’s efforts to maintain and monitor the technology. But he also notes that AI is different than past innovations, like the electronic medical record, because it’s being embraced and used by consumers at home and elsewhere. It’s more like the internet or the smartphone, two ideas that took time to develop and expand.

The real challenge, he says, is not in the technology—advanced data and predictive analytics tools have been around for a long time—but in how it can be used. The pressure is on the industry to improve outcomes, reduce costs and stabilize a stressed-out workforce, and that pressure will intensify as workforce issues continue and the growing population of seniors demands better care options.

“You have the capability to do something amazing, but you also have the pressure and the urgency,” he says.

“AI is just one of those where we think the world has changed, you know, within a year or two,” Odeh says. “And then we realize it’s a lot harder and it takes a lot longer, but we probably don’t even realize just how transformative this truly will be.”

“People tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate the impact in the long run,” he adds, citing Amara’s Law. “But I think over the next 10 years what we will achieve in the healthcare space will be truly amazing. It will be probably 10 times what we’ve been able to do with data and analytics in the last decade.”

Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.

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