Reimagining the Future of Chronic Disease Care, With Cadence CMO Eve Cunningham, MD

Key Podcast Moments

• Eve Cunningham explains why early remote patient monitoring failed, and why simply sending devices to patients without accountability was never going to work.
• Eve recounts how discharging hysterectomy patients the same day exposed the real challenge in healthcare: change management, not technology.
• The conversation breaks down why health systems are drowning in dashboards but still struggle to act on data in meaningful ways.
• Eve shares the personal story of her father’s chronic illness and how it shaped her belief that patients need continuous, upstream care and not episodic rescue.

Chronic disease care has become one of medicine’s most stubborn failures, despite decades of investment, data collection, and technological promise. Few clinicians have seen that failure from as many angles as Eve Cunningham. Trained as an OB-GYN, she spent years delivering babies and performing surgery before moving into health system leadership, overseeing large-scale care transformation efforts, and eventually stepping into health tech as Chief Medical Officer at Cadence. That arc gives her a rare credibility when she talks about what actually breaks and what can realistically be rebuilt.

In this episode of How I Doctor, Graham Walker and Eve unpack why chronic disease outcomes remain so poor even as medicine becomes more sophisticated. Eve argues that the core issue isn’t clinician effort or insufficient technology, but a care model built around episodic encounters that are fundamentally mismatched to conditions like heart failure, diabetes, and hypertension. By the time patients show up in clinic or the hospital, the opportunity to intervene early has often already passed.

Rather than framing the solution as more data or better dashboards, Eve focuses on accountability and care design. She explains why early attempts at remote patient monitoring failed: devices generated streams of information, but no one was clearly responsible for acting on it. In practice, this shifted more cognitive load onto already overwhelmed physicians, turning monitoring into noise instead of meaningful care.

Against that backdrop, Eve contrasts health system inertia with models that emphasize speed, clarity, and clinician-led execution. She describes how pairing remote monitoring with defined clinical services, protocols, and reimbursement finally made proactive care possible. Throughout the episode, Eve returns to a deeply human motivation. She shares how her father’s experience with multiple chronic illnesses exposed the fragmentation patients live with every day: too many medications, too many specialists, and no one consistently checking in. Reimagining chronic disease care, she argues, isn’t about replacing physicians or adding more technology, it’s about building systems that support continuous, proactive care for patients and sustainable practice for clinicians.

This is not a conversation about disruption for its own sake. It’s about redesigning care around reality: how patients live, how diseases progress, and how clinicians actually work when given the right structure and support.

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Top 4 Takeaways

Taken together, Eve’s perspective challenges many of the assumptions baked into modern healthcare delivery. From how often we see patients to who is actually responsible for acting on their data. These takeaways distill the core lessons from the conversation and highlight what clinicians and health systems need to rethink if chronic disease care is going to improve.