Mount Sinai Health System is one of New York's largest academic medical systems: eight hospital campuses, the Icahn School of Medicine, and a sprawling outpatient network across the metro area. A system that size buys constantly. Medical devices, pharmaceuticals, lab supplies, facilities and construction services, IT, food service, professional services, and the long tail of everything a hospital runs on.
If you want to sell to Mount Sinai, the process is less about a single "apply here" button and more about getting credentialed correctly and getting in front of the right buyer. Here is how it works, and where being a certified diverse business changes the math.
What Mount Sinai buysHealthcare procurement splits roughly into two worlds, and which one you fall into shapes your path.
Clinical and med-surg spend runs through supply chain and is heavily standardized. Mount Sinai, like most large systems, buys a big share of clinical products through a group purchasing organization (GPO) and through contracted distributors. Breaking in here usually means either holding a GPO agreement or displacing an incumbent on price, clinical evidence, or supply reliability.
Non-clinical spend is wider open. Construction and renovation, facilities maintenance, professional and consulting services, marketing, staffing, office and janitorial supplies, food, and IT services. This is where small and diverse suppliers most often win their first contract, because buying decisions sit closer to individual departments and are less locked into national GPO catalogs.
Knowing which bucket your product sits in tells you whether you are chasing a category manager in supply chain or a department-level decision maker.
Vendor registration and credentialingMount Sinai does not let just anyone walk into a clinical building. Two credentialing layers matter before any real business happens.
First, suppliers are expected to register company information through Mount Sinai's compliance screening process, which runs vendor records against federal exclusion lists (the OIG and related sanctions checks every health system is required to perform). No hospital will set up a payable vendor that is sitting on a federal exclusion list, so expect to provide your legal entity details, tax information, and ownership.
Second, if your business sends anyone into a Mount Sinai facility, a medical, pharmaceutical, device, or other clinically related representative, that person must be credentialed as a vendor representative before they visit. Reps sign in and pick up a badge at the time of each visit. This is standard across large hospital systems and is non-negotiable for anyone calling on clinicians or stepping into clinical space. Practically, that means immunization records, training attestations, and a credentialing profile per rep.
The cleanest first move is to email the procurement or supplier diversity team (below) and ask which registration and credentialing systems apply to your category, rather than guessing. Hospital credentialing platforms differ, and you do not want to spend a week in the wrong portal.
The supplier diversity programMount Sinai runs a supplier diversity program out of its Office for Diversity and Inclusion, and it is more than a webpage. The system frames its goal as building a supplier base that reflects its patients and community, and it actively works to route opportunities to small and underrepresented businesses, host networking events, and make the internal business case to its own category buyers.
The numbers tell you it is funded, not symbolic. Mount Sinai's inaugural Million Dollar Circle recognized 28 underrepresented vendors that each delivered more than $1 million in products and services in 2022 and again in 2023, and the system reported spending more than $70 million a year with that group alone. That is a real diverse-spend pipeline, and those are 28 suppliers who started somewhere.
The contact point for the program is supplierdiversity@mountsinai.org. For a diverse-owned business, that inbox is often a faster and warmer entry than cold-pitching a category manager, because the supplier diversity team's job is to find businesses like yours and connect them internally.
Certification: get it before you reach outMount Sinai's public materials describe a commitment to supplier diversity but do not publish a fixed list of accepted certifications, so confirm specifics with the team. That said, the corporate supplier-diversity world runs on a small set of recognized credentials, and a New York health system will be familiar with all of them:
- NMSDC / MBE for minority-owned businesses, the dominant private-sector credential. Our NMSDC certification guide walks through eligibility and the process.
- WBENC / WBE for women-owned businesses.
- New York State and NYC MWBE certifications, which carry weight with a New York institution and with any publicly funded projects it touches.
- Veteran (NaVOBA/VBE), LGBTQ+ (NGLCC), and disability-owned (Disability:IN) certifications where they apply.
Walking in already certified does two things. It lets the supplier diversity team count your spend toward their diversity reporting, which is exactly the metric they are measured on, and it signals you have done your homework. If you are not certified yet, that is the step to take before you send the introduction email, not after. If you are juggling several certifications at once, CertifyAll captures your business information once and handles the filing across multiple programs.
How to actually get in the doorA workable sequence:
- Get certified in the credential that fits your ownership, and renew it on time. Lapsed certifications are a common reason suppliers drop off diversity rosters.
- Build a tight capability statement that names your NAICS codes, your hospital or institutional references, and the specific category you serve. Healthcare buyers want to see relevant experience and reliability.
- Email supplierdiversity@mountsinai.org with a short, specific note: what you sell, your certification(s), and any healthcare clients. Ask who owns your category and how to register.
- Complete compliance registration and rep credentialing as directed before expecting a purchase order.
- Show up at the networking events the program runs. Those rooms are where category managers and diverse suppliers actually meet.
If you are still mapping which large buyers run programs like this, our corporate supplier diversity directory and the public supplier profiles on this site are a good way to spot adjacent opportunities while you work the Mount Sinai relationship.
Next stepGetting into a system like Mount Sinai rewards the businesses that are credentialed and certified before they make contact. If certification is the piece you are missing, start there. You can see what you qualify for and how the filing works at CertifyAll, then send your introduction once the paperwork is real.
Sources: Mount Sinai Supplier Diversity, Mount Sinai Million Dollar Circle
