Spotlight On: Karen Feinstein, President & CEO, Jewish Healthcare Foundation
September 2025 — In an interview with Invest:, Karen Feinstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, detailed the organization’s unwavering focus on its core priorities while strategically shifting tactics to maximize impact. “We shift within priorities. We don’t shift priorities,” Feinstein said.
Over the past 12 months, what have been the most significant changes at the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, and how are these shifts shaping the organization’s direction?
We shift within our healthcare priorities. We don’t shift priorities. What I’ve tried to do over 34 years is keep us focused. We work at all levels: from neighborhoods to statewide to national and even global. Our five priorities are safety, particularly patient safety, women’s health, teen mental health, HIV/AIDS, and older adults. We’ve always had a women’s health agenda, but we doubled down over the last few years. Though women marched around the world in 2017, there was no consensus about what they were marching for. Regarding patient safety and our ambitious work to reduce harm dating back to 1997, we have swerved our focus several times. We got close to getting a National Patient Safety Board approved during the Biden Administration. We led that initiative and got bipartisan legislation introduced in Congress. A National Patient Safety Team was the number one recommendation of a workgroup from the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Sadly, we had a change in administration, so we had to switch gears. That led us to the recognition that you don’t have to have a federal agency focused on safety. It could be a private agency. We have a new initiative now called CASH, which has four powerful national partners. We hope to have a number of policy directives and we’re looking to form what we call the “Ambition Health System,” which is a health system that’s totally committed to a platform of safety.
We also had a big event at CES 2025. We had launched over 70 Patient Safety Technology Challenges over the last 2-3 years in all the innovation hubs around the country. The winners were then put in competition. The finalists of these winners were on stage at CES in Las Vegas. The winner of the Patient Safety Technology Challenge Grand Awards invented an app for women to predict if they are likely to experience a difficult pregnancy.
One other thing I’d mention is that Pittsburgh has not put out a claim to a label to which it is entitled. We could easily be called the Safety Capital of the World. Any book on industrial safety begins in Pittsburgh. You can go back to the airbrake and the coupler for locomotives. You can consider mine safety breakthroughs. Or people like Rachel Carson, Peter Safar, who invented CPR, Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. But you can look at the present. We’re a leader in autonomous vehicles. We put moon rovers into space. So, we have this very rich history and present and future. We are #1 in AI and ML, and tops in robotics. We want to declare ourselves the safety capital of the world because we’ll form new partnerships, we’ll attract new research. Everyone appreciates and honors safety.
How is the Jewish Healthcare Foundation supporting underserved populations, including immigrant communities and those facing mental health challenges?
We have a strong maternal health focus in women’s health. We know that in America the women who are most disadvantaged are Black women. You can’t do a maternal health priority without focusing on the community with the most vulnerable to bad outcomes. The immigrant community is also of keen interest to us. We founded the Squirrel Hill Health Center a decade ago to reach out to immigrant communities. It makes care in many different languages available and was set up to accommodate cultural differences. They also have a mobile van to treat patients because our immigrant communities are scattered geographically. The Squirrel Hill Health Center is designed with a particular sensitivity to the needs of immigrant communities.
HIV/AIDS also had outsized impact on the minority community here. Of course, just being LGBTQ+ in Pittsburgh is a minority status. We’ve been involved in HIV/AIDS since the foundation began, and we are the state’s fiscal agent for HIV/AIDS funding in Western Pennsylvania.
How do you see the Jewish Healthcare Foundation evolving its mission over the next five years?
We travel the world to find the best solutions to bring home. One example is a safety net for teen mental health in Australia. We went to visit one of their headspace centers. They have almost 160 now, paid for by the government. Teens can walk in at any time. They do everything from treating early onset psychosis to peer counseling to primary care. We returned and funded two headspaces here within agencies already in existence. I want to see a localized touchpoint for teens everywhere, where teens can just drop in and get the care they need so their problems don’t escalate. We need to invest in our next generation.
We also went to Japan and Singapore because we were interested in longevity hubs. These are localized touchpoints for seniors, applying innovation and all available and necessary services to keep seniors healthy and independent. The objective is to keep older adults out of hospitals, nursing homes, and emergency rooms. Also, to end social isolation. We’re building a model for the United States. Overall, we look for solutions that are powerful and doable, and then we try to create a model so people can learn from it. Our purpose is to spread and sustain what works.
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