The Underdog Physician Podcast

On the Underdog Physician podcast, Dr. Eve Cunningham, MD, MBA, shares her path from Arizona to OBGYN training at Kaiser, faculty at UCLA, and nearly two decades in health systems leadership, including serving as chief medical officer for a 350-clinician Providence medical group. Frustrated by poor tech fit, she pushed into Providence corporate development, helped evaluate vendors and expand virtual care programs, and incubated MedPearl, a Providence-built clinical decision support platform that unifies patient chart data with guidelines and pathways to streamline care and referrals. She later brought Cadence to Providence and now serves as Cadence’s CMO, describing how scalable remote patient monitoring requires tech plus clinical services to manage alerts and integrate workflows, and noting the need to reduce barriers to digital innovation amid access and workforce crises.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:49 Origin Story and OBGYN Path
01:50 Kaiser Training and Early Career
03:36 Leadership Rise and MBA Journey
05:08 Providence CMO to Tech Pivot
06:36 COVID Virtual Care and MedPearl Idea
08:21 Telehealth Portfolio and Cadence Partnership
12:56 Mentorship and Career Guidance
16:36 Is an MBA Worth It
18:38 Finding Purpose and Reinvention
21:57 Inside MedPearl Clinical AI Platform
25:28 Digital Health Startup Mistakes
29:58 Regulation AI and Access Crisis
32:07 Startup Life and Rapid Innovation
34:31 Legacy and Final Advice

On the Underdog Physician podcast, host Anish interviews Louis Green, founder of Prestiq Wealth, a wealth advisor with CFA, CFP, and CPWA credentials and prior roles at Bankers Trust/Deutsche Bank, PNC, and UBS. Green shares his Brooklyn origins, interest in investing, and his move toward fiduciary, tech-enabled holistic planning at Savvy Advisors, plus his book Five Steps to Retirement Planning and mentoring with Savvy Ladies. He highlights common blind spots for high-income professionals such as short-term, undiversified day-trading behavior and tax implications of short-term gains. He advises doing deeper research or using diversified vehicles like ETFs and focusing on asset allocation. Trends discussed include buffered ETFs for downside hedging, direct indexing for tax-loss harvesting, and renewed attractiveness of fixed income with higher rates. They cover retirement and tax strategies (401(k)/403(b), solo 401(k), deferred comp, mega/backdoor Roth, HSA, donor-advised funds), estate planning basics, entrepreneurship planning and avoiding over-leveraged marketing, team culture, managing volatility by staying invested, and Green’s legacy goal of getting more people to have financial and retirement plans.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
01:00 Louis Green Origin Story
02:47 Physician Money Blind Spots
04:06 Avoiding Day Trading Traps
05:40 Credentials and Planning Style
07:07 New Allocation Trends
08:57 Buffered ETFs Explained
10:27 Founding Prestiq Wealth
12:08 Aligning Portfolios With Life
14:10 Retirement Accounts and Taxes
17:13 Five Steps Book Takeaways
18:37 Family and Entrepreneur Scenarios
21:31 Building Teams and Culture
23:44 Mentorship and Work Rhythm
26:42 Handling Volatility and Timing
28:45 S&P 500 Run and Cycles
31:30 Legacy and Closing

Amazon book:
https://www.amazon.com/STEPS-RETIREMENT-PLANNING-Actions-Retirement-ebook/dp/B0DNVK48FW/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=WRMPi&content-id=amzn1.sym.3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_p=3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_r=145-4756456-8694467&pd_rd_wg=k1Rix&pd_rd_r=cc05f83e-a4e9-430b-b5c1-a8cdf2f1e9eb

On the Underdog Physician podcast, serial entrepreneur and investor David Norris—co-founder and CEO of Affinion Health (AI-powered inbox and workflow automation) and an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner—shares his entrepreneurial journey, emphasizing passion, perseverance, and team alignment over perfect planning or chasing money. He describes early lessons from building fraud-prevention checkout keypad systems, argues “engineered luck” comes from raising opportunity through great teams, and discusses the emotional realities of exits, including a near-IPO lost to a market crash. Norris explains Affinion’s AI agent triages EHR inbox work (labs, prescription renewals, and upcoming patient messaging), cutting inbox volume 40–50% and freeing about five hours weekly, while avoiding regulatory risk by following provider-defined protocols rather than making clinical decisions. He covers fundraising (a $5M round), competitive strategy (embedding into EHRs, low pricing), investor red flags, mentorship value, intense time-boxed work habits, and a legacy goal of improving patient care by better equipping providers.

On the Underdog Physician podcast, host Anish interviews Dr. Rashika Bansal about her path from India to U.S. training in internal medicine and an NIH endocrinology fellowship that shaped her focus on obesity and metabolism, followed by work at Cleveland Clinic and a move back to the Northeast. She explains why she launched HALT Clinic to deliver more streamlined, closely monitored weight management and metabolic care amid growth of telehealth weight-loss companies, compounded drugs, and social-media misinformation. Dr. Bansal discusses the value of ABOM certification, HALT’s protocols including body composition tracking, CGM-guided nutrition personalization, and lab monitoring, and potential expansion into longevity, stress management, yoga, and peptides. She shares startup lessons on bureaucracy, marketing, delegation, team-building, bootstrapping, and balancing business ethics with medicine, plus work-life integration, exercise habits, supplements, and a legacy goal of improving women’s health and empowering female physician entrepreneurs.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
01:02 Origin Story and Training
02:50 Mentors and Finding Endocrinology
05:30 Exploring Career Options
07:46 Why Start Halt Clinic
10:11 ABOM and Obesity Expertise
12:10 Halt Protocols and KPIs
14:57 Startup Lessons and Team
17:45 Co-Founder and Early Mistakes
21:12 Scaling Without Losing Quality
22:48 Bootstrapping and Knowing Numbers
25:09 Work Life Integration and Wellness
29:35 Advice Legacy and Closing

On the Underdog Physician podcast, hospitalist and host interviews Dr. Minal Shah, medical director of virtual care at CommonSpirit Health’s Mountain region and an informaticist on the CommonSpirit national team. Shah shares how early exposure to medicine led her to Baylor College of Medicine for residency and chief residency, why she chose hospital medicine for its acuity, variety, and shift flexibility, and how a 2021 Stanford AI in Healthcare conference sparked her transition into digital health. She discusses ways to build informatics skills, the importance of physician involvement in tool development, and how AI such as ambient scribes can reduce EHR burden while raising concerns about over-reliance. She outlines virtual hospitalist care models, emphasizes change management and clinician adoption challenges, highlights mentorship, recommends Designing Your Life, and describes her work on large-scale EHR implementation and an ideal interoperable, insight-driven EHR.

00:00 Meet Dr Minal Shah
00:54 Early Path to Medicine
02:38 Why Hospital Medicine
03:57 AI Conference Turning Point
04:53 Building Informatics Skills
07:38 AI and Patient Connection
11:31 Virtual Care Leadership
13:53 What Clinical Informatics Is
18:04 Virtual Hospitalist Models
20:53 Lessons Across Health Systems
23:00 Mentors and Career Design
29:14 Weekly Workflow and Travel
30:24 Legacy and Ideal EHR
33:23 Closing Thanks