Healthcare costs keep climbing, quality needs improvement, and physicians are burning out. These are a few of the reasons Ash Gokli, MD, Chief Medical Officer for the Sutter Health Valley Area believes physicians must step into leadership roles and create the future of healthcare. 
An American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL) board member and self-described student of leadership, Dr. Gokli describes his path to leadership and his strategies for leading effectively despite a constant onslaught of meetings and time-consuming commitments. In our focused conversation, Dr. Gokli discusses how physicians can create their own path to the C-suite by garnering non-clinical knowledge, volunteering for new projects, and leveraging their passion for patient care. 
https://www.physicianleaders.org/about/board/ash-gokli
 

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Make Magic Happen:  CMO Ash Gokli Shares His  Thoughts About the Physician Leader‘s Role 

Ash Gokli, MD, MMM, CPE, FAAPL, FACEP

Self-Management

Self-Awareness

Professional Capabilities

Influence

Motivations and Thinking Style

Motivate Others

What happens when the art of medicine collides with the rise of clinical algorithms, electronic health records, and artificial intelligence? In this episode of SoundPractice, host Mike Sacopulos speaks with Devjit Roy, MD, MAS, MSPC, CPE, from Nathan Littauer Hospital in rural New York — about his book, Between Heartbeats and Algorithms: Reclaiming What Matters in Healthcare. 

Roy explains how the book grew from journals he kept while working on the front lines of a COVID surge hospital, where he recorded patient stories as a way of processing the trauma. Years later, those stories became the foundation for a call to action: Physicians must step into leadership to ensure that technology serves medicine — not the other way around.

He also serves as medical director of the hospital's nursing home, board member for Mountain Valley Hospice, and co-president of a regional joint venture focused on preserving specialty care. He continues to practice as a hospitalist and palliative care physician.

Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership at www.physicianleaders.org.


Between Heartbeats and Algorithms: Reclaiming What Matters in Healthcare with Dr. Devjit Roy

Devjit Roy, MD, CPE

Quality and Risk

Quality Improvement

Strategy and Innovation

Environmental Influences

Few physicians ever experience healthcare from the perspective of a health plan, but Jacob Asher, MD, is an exception. A former ENT surgeon with Kaiser Permanente, Asher shifted gears in 2008 to pursue a career in commercial health plan management. Over the next 14 years, he served as California Commercial Market Medical Director for Anthem Blue Cross, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare. Today, he shares his expertise by mentoring students in Stanford University's Master’s Program in Medical Informatics.

In this conversation with host Michael Sacopulos, Asher pulls back the curtain on commercial insurance — from how contracts are structured, to who holds pricing power, why behavioral health has been siloed, and what AI might finally be able to fix in a system long defined by friction and misaligned incentives. Asher also shares how serving on Kaiser Permanente’s Medical Group Board of Directors helped prompt his move from surgery into health plan leadership. He also discusses the role of AAPL (then ACPE) in preparing physicians for non-clinical career paths.

Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership at www.physicianleaders.org.


The Circle of Money: What Physicians Need to Know About Health Plan Contracting with Dr. Jacob Asher

Jacob Asher, MD

Finance

Payment Models

Economics

Financial Management

What does it take to build a culture of ethics inside a health system — and what happens when leaders lack the courage to defend it? 
In this episode of SoundPractice, host Mike Sacopulos sits down with Arthur Caplan, PhD, one of the world's foremost bioethicists and the founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine's Department of Population Health.

Dr. Caplan traces his path into bioethics from a childhood hospitalization for polio to graduate training at Columbia, where he witnessed firsthand the ethical gaps in medicine's early encounters with IVF, informed consent, and research oversight. That experience shaped a career devoted not just to theorizing about ethics, but to solving real problems in real institutions.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Caplan and Mike Sacopulos explore:

- What an effective ethics infrastructure looks like 
- The defining bioethical challenges of the next decade 
- Compassionate use and unproven therapies 
- Misinformation and informed consent 
- Rationing and equity 
- Bioethics training for the next generation 

Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership.


Ethics at the Edge: Bioethics, AI, and the Courage to Lead with Arthur Caplan, PhD

Arthur Caplan, PhD

Integrity

Problem Solving

Critical Appraisal Skills

Health Law

In this episode of SoundPractice, host Mike Sacopulos speaks with two physician-researchers whose landmark study is sounding an early warning about the long-term consequences of state abortion restrictions on the U.S. physician workforce. Anisha Ganguly, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Anna Morenz, MD, MPH, assistant clinical professor of internal medicine at the University of Arizona, discuss their study published in JAMA Network Open in March 2026.

Their study analyzed nearly 24.2 million residency applications submitted to more than 4,300 programs across all medical specialties between the 2018–2019 and 2022–2023 application cycles. Using an interrupted time-series causal methodology developed in collaboration with health economist Anirban Basu, PhD, MS, at the University of Washington, the team found that applications to programs in states enacting new abortion restrictions after Dobbs dropped significantly — among both male and female applicants.

Among the conversation’s most striking moments: Ganguly reveals that the decline among men applicants was larger than expected — and larger than they had originally hypothesized. She and Morenz discuss why this makes Dobbs an “all of us” problem, not just a women’s issue, and what it signals about the broader reproductive climate of restricted states. 

The episode also covers the pipeline problem: because more than half of physicians ultimately practice in the state where they trained, sustained declines in application volume could worsen existing physician shortages in primary care and emergency medicine in restricted states for years to come. Morenz shares a timely update: in the most recent March 2026 match cycle, two OB-GYN residency programs — both in Texas — failed to fill all their slots.

Study Reference:
Ganguly AP, Basu A, Morenz AM. State-Level Disparities in Residency Applications After Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. JAMA Netw Open. 2026;9(3):e260286. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.0286

Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership at www.physicianleaders.org.


Where Will Doctors Train? Residency Applications, Abortion Restrictions, and the Coming Workforce Crisis with Dr. Anisha Ganguly & Dr. Anna Morenz

Anisha Ganguly, MD, MPH

Anna Morenz, MD, MPH

What does commanding troops in combat have to do with leading a hospital? More than you might think. In this episode of SoundPractice, host Mike Sacopulos sits down with Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, U.S. Army (Ret) — former commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, CNN military analyst — to explore the surprising parallels between military and medical leadership. Soldiers and physicians share more in common than most realize. Both are defined by their profession first, and both operate in life-and-death environments where leadership is not optional.

Hertling shares how he came to spend nearly a decade at AdventHealth developing physician leadership programs, what his doctoral research revealed about inter-professional training, and why getting doctors, nurses, and administrators in the same room may be the single most important thing hospitals can do. Inter-professional leadership training produces measurably better outcomes than siloed programs.

He also discusses his newly released memoir, If I Don't Return: A Father's Wartime Journal, drawn from a handwritten journal he kept during Operation Desert Storm.

Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership at www.physicianleaders.org.


From Battlefield to Bedside: Physician Leadership Lessons from Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling

Mark Hertling, DBA

Accountability

Comfort with Visibility

What does it mean to truly flourish at work — and why are physician leaders especially vulnerable to losing that?

In this episode of SoundPractice, host Mike Sacopulos sits down with MaryCay Durrant, a nationally recognized expert on human fulfillment whose 30-year career has taken her inside transformation efforts at Deloitte, Pepsi, Johnson & Johnson, Hyatt, and — increasingly — the world of healthcare and physician leadership. MaryCay brings a perspective that is part organizational science, part nature wisdom, and entirely focused on helping leaders rediscover what fuels them. Her approach helps human beings flourish at work. 

The conversation moves from the personal — MaryCay's father was a pediatrician and president of the American College of Physician Executives — to the deeply practical, as she walks through her WORK model, a framework for combating burnout through small, consistent adjustments rather than wholesale system overhaul.  As she describes in two compelling case studies, meaningful change happens through small communities of practice — not top-down mandates.

Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership at www.physicianleaders.org.


How Physician Leaders Can Rediscover Their Human Spirit with MaryCay Durrant

MaryCay Durrant

Resilience

Humility

Make Magic Happen: CMO Ash Gokli Shares His Thoughts About the Physician Leader‘s Role

RECENT EPISODES

Between Heartbeats and Algorithms: Reclaiming What Matters in Healthcare with Dr. Devjit Roy

The Circle of Money: What Physicians Need to Know About Health Plan Contracting with Dr. Jacob Asher

Ethics at the Edge: Bioethics, AI, and the Courage to Lead with Arthur Caplan, PhD

Where Will Doctors Train? Residency Applications, Abortion Restrictions, and the Coming Workforce Crisis with Dr. Anisha Ganguly & Dr. Anna Morenz

From Battlefield to Bedside: Physician Leadership Lessons from Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling

How Physician Leaders Can Rediscover Their Human Spirit with MaryCay Durrant

RELATED EPISODES

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Ethics at the Edge: Bioethics, AI, and the Courage to Lead with Arthur Caplan, PhD

From Battlefield to Bedside: Physician Leadership Lessons from Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling

Between Heartbeats and Algorithms: Reclaiming What Matters in Healthcare with Dr. Devjit Roy

How Physician Leaders Can Rediscover Their Human Spirit with MaryCay Durrant