Overview: Join us for an insightful conversation with Smita Agarkar, MD, CPE, FAAPL, a distinguished physician leader. She shares her journey from clinical practice to a significant leadership position offering valuable advice for early-career physicians and highlights the crucial contributions of women in healthcare leadership. Agarkar discusses her shift from outpatient to inpatient care, her leadership experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, and her current roles at Gracie Square Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine.
Women in Leadership:
Trends in healthcare leadership.
The importance of diversity and inclusivity in leadership roles.
Unique contributions of women leaders in healthcare.

Advice for Early-Career Physicians:
Overcoming unexpected barriers.
Importance of emotional intelligence and empathy.
Building relationships and being assertive.

Leadership Styles and Challenges:
Transformative leadership approach.
Building teams and changing culture.
Navigating complex healthcare environments.

Essential Leadership Skills:
Building relationships and accountability.
Trust, empathy, and active listening.
Importance of emotional intelligence.

Meta-Leadership:
Concept and application in healthcare.
Expanding thinking beyond formal boundaries.
Interdependence and unity of mission.


About the Expert: Smita Agarkar, MD, CPE, FAAPL, serves as Service Chief of Gracie Square Hospital, is Quality and Patient Safety Chair, and is an Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Listen Now: Gain practical advice and inspiration from a seasoned healthcare leader.
Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership.


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Navigating Healthcare Leadership with Dr. Smita Agarkar

Smita Agarkar, MD, CPE, FAAPL

Professional Capabilities

Influence

Motivations and Thinking Style

Trust and Respect

Operations and Policy

Communication Strategies

What happens when a physician becomes a patient — and discovers that medicine can heal the body but leave the person behind? In this episode of SoundPractice, host Mike Sacopulos sits down with Rana Awdish, MD, medical director of care experience at Henry Ford Health and bestselling author of In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope.

Awdish's path to physician leadership is unlike most. As a pulmonary and critical care fellow at Henry Ford, she nearly died — and that experience cracked open a new understanding of what physicians actually need to do their jobs well. She began building a communications curriculum, quietly and without a formal title, until the work proved so effective that the institution asked her to lead it systemwide. Today she oversees care experience, runs the Pulmonary Hypertension Program, and helps shape Henry Ford's physician onboarding and Leadership Institute.

The conversation is equal parts practical and profound. Awdish describes Henry Ford's "senior peer partner" model — a social mentoring program that pairs new hires with seasoned clinicians not to teach clinical skills but to transmit culture. 

And she shares what comes next. Her forthcoming book, Aftershock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness, goes deeper than In Shock did, tracing a second journey — through somatic healing, art, and what she calls "re-embodiment" — that ultimately led her to discover her own undetected cancer. The book is a challenge to medicine's assumptions about where healing begins and ends.

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


Healing from the Inside Out: How Medicine Must Learn to Share Its Power with Dr. Rana Awdish

Rana Awdish, MD

Comfort with Visibility

Quality and Risk

Quality Improvement

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

Self-Management

Self-Awareness

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

Navigating Healthcare Leadership with Dr. Smita Agarkar

RECENT EPISODES

Healing from the Inside Out: How Medicine Must Learn to Share Its Power with Dr. Rana Awdish

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

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