Cedar Mission, Purpose & Impact

Healthcare affordability isn't a niche issue — it's the number one affordability concern for Americans today, ahead of housing and food. As Seth Cohen, our President, puts it: "If a provider chooses not to address the patient affordability crisis, both mission and margin suffer. Mission suffers because if you repair someone's heart and ruin their credit, is that really caring fully for that patient?"
Every feature we build, every client we serve, and every patient interaction we enable is a contribution to closing that gap. We also bring our inclusivity values into our product — Cedar has run accessibility workstreams to remove barriers for patients with impairments or language differences, and we see that work as a direct expression of our mission.

Our values aren't decorative — they shape how we evaluate candidates, how we recognise and reward employees, and how we make decisions. John, a Principal People Business Partner, describes it plainly: "It really is a very honest articulation from the company — this is the way that we operate, this is what we look for in the people you will be working with. And we've stayed true to that for my five and a half years."

Liz, our Chief People Officer, echoes this, noting that after six and a half years, "the culture feels incredibly consistent in terms of how we look after each other, how we build sustainable teams and practices, how we take really, really seriously all of the commitments that we have to patients, clients, and regulators."

At Cedar, values show up in how teams work, not just how the company talks about itself. Max Chen, who leads the Product Security team, describes a management philosophy rooted in all four of Cedar's core values. It starts with ‘focus on the vision’. "We deal with patient data," he says. "We have a moral responsibility to protect that patient data." From there, the culture he describes is one where ‘rejecting mediocrity’ is a team sport, not a manager's job. Max actively expects his team to push back on his own thinking. "There's been lots of times where, for my own personal projects, I'll come up with a metric and my team says, is that actually valuable?" Cedar's DRI model is where ‘use good judgment’ becomes concrete. A directly responsible individual has final say on a project, and Max holds to that even when he sees it differently. "If you take that advice and you say, no, actually, I have deep context on this problem... I will trust you as a manager to do that, even if I personally disagree." And when things don't go as planned, that is where ‘applying a growth mindset’ takes over. Max sees suboptimal outcomes as part of the process: the people who go through them come out better team members on the other side. At Cedar, that is not a consolation. That's the point.
 

The moment Cedar was built for is now. The affordability crisis is accelerating, insurance coverage is contracting, and patients need help navigating a system that has never been more difficult to navigate. Cedar has a decade of experience, 1.5 billion patient interactions of data, and a technology stack that is finally capable of delivering the personalization and scale that this moment demands. To date, Cedar has supported more than 50 million patients nationwide. 
As John, a Principal People Business Partner, puts it: "Our mission is even more important now. This is the opportunity that we were built for."