MD Live is a U.S. virtual healthcare provider offering patients access to medical care through phone and video consultations. Part of Evernorth Health Services within The Cigna Group, MD Live connects millions of patients with clinicians across urgent care, primary care, mental health and dermatology, providing an alternative to traditional in-person care.
Before joining Evernorth in 2022, you had an unconventional path into healthcare. When did healthcare first come onto your radar?
I’ve always been a consumer of the healthcare space. I did IVF for my children and navigated the day-to-day of what it is like in America to try to have a kid. But it was a pivot for me into healthcare. My background is in robotics and energy engineering, and then I ended up at this intersection of product, human-centered design, business and technology. I believe very strongly that if you’re going to have the privilege to pick the industry, pick something that matters. It’s always been environmental, finance and now healthcare. It has quickly become the industry I feel most passionate about.
With the emergence of AI and how that’s transforming healthcare, it feels like coming home for me. You’ve got new technology, evolving business models and clear patient need. If you can get all three right, you can unlock new ways of working.
MD Live has evolved significantly since 2009. What can virtual care make possible for patients today?
We do dermatology and behavioral health, including psychology and psychiatry, as well as urgent and primary care. Many people in the U.S. don’t have an established relationship with a primary care provider, so somebody can have an innocuous question, and their only path is urgent care. We call it everyday care: somewhere between your annual wellness visit and, “My eye is twitching, do I need to do anything about it?” There will always be conditions that aren’t appropriate for virtual care, but often people simply want to understand: am I okay, and do I need to do something else?
We offer video, phone and asynchronous care, which is our fastest-growing modality. Technology helps streamline the intake process for a provider, who reviews it, completes the care path or follows up by phone. They can give you a recommendation, write the prescription and have it delivered to your home without you having to schedule a visit. The other day, I had a cold coming on. I have two kids and didn’t have time to get to a doctor – so in a short period of time, my visit was completed and I had guidance on what to do next. That’s what virtual care can provide people.
As AI increasingly becomes the front door to healthcare, how do you ensure greater patient autonomy without losing clinical judgment and accountability?
AI can help people navigate care more efficiently, but clinical judgment and accountability remain essential. Every major technology advancement has followed roughly the same pattern: You have a massive shift in technology, then an accountability layer gets wrapped around it, which builds consumer trust and leads to mass adoption. Think about aviation. You had accreditation, pilots who knew what they were doing and an FAA system that allowed mass adoption with safety and public trust.
That applies nowhere more acutely than healthcare. Frontier models are only going to get smarter, but where is the trust, where is the accountability and what happens when something goes wrong?
You can have a device company collecting data and a frontier model synthesizing it, but at no step has anyone necessarily said, “I’m accountable for that patient’s care journey.” We need a human in the loop. At MD Live, our role is to bring together technology, clinical expertise and appropriate oversight so these innovations can be deployed responsibly to help patients while earning trust.
Virtual care was once treated as separate from healthcare more broadly. Are we reaching a point where that distinction is disappearing?
We’re in the awkward middle phase. Before, virtual care was considered an alternative path to the same approach. Now, fundamentally, the order of operations is shifting in real time. At the end of the day, the goal is to help the patient in the moment that matters most and get them the right care. The forum is less important than fast access, but quality is always critical.
That’s why virtual care has become more interwoven with how care is delivered. Behavioral health is an interesting example: don’t have behavioral health over here and your physical health over there. Technology will allow you to bring those closer together in a new way.
With 50 million members across all 50 states, where do you see MD Live expanding from here?
We’re more focused on conditions than geography. The first question is: is this the right mode of care for me, and can you help me right now? We want to answer that in a way that is credible and clinically sound as quickly as possible. Helping people address health concerns earlier, stay engaged in their care and navigate the system more easily can have a meaningful impact on their long-term health and well-being. Within primary care, we do a lot in weight management, cardio-diabetes and women’s health, including perimenopause and menopause, and we’ll continue to grow in those spaces.
We are very forward-thinking in our AI journey and continue to accelerate in strategic ways. One example is we’ve deployed AI to help clinicians develop standard summaries of a patient visit and treatment plan, cutting down their time by half so they can spend more time on patient care. The other part we’re helping advance is what AI triage looks like in a truly trusted, human-in-the-loop product at scale: how do you have what feels like a conversation, with the confidence of knowing every visit is reviewed by a medical professional and, if needed, a medical professional can call you? States are already taking different approaches to regulating AI, which underscores the importance of thoughtful governance and oversight in this fast-evolving space.
Your new role brings MD Live and Evernorth Pharmacy Advancement under the same leadership. What opportunities do you see in bringing virtual care and pharmacy closer together?
A good patient experience involves highly connected care. Today, the medication experience can feel siloed: you’re on a new or recurring medication, there are side effects and adjustments as you work with the care team to find the right dose, and you’re trying to manage all of that. If we can offer pharmacy and virtual-care wraparound services together, you can help people navigate that journey and create a more holistic experience. GLP-1s and weight management are a good example: there’s a mental health component, a physical health component, a pharmacy component, and a dietary component. By bringing these capabilities together in a more connected way, we can help people access more connected support throughout their journey.
There are also many scenarios where we can help with medication adherence. Someone gets on a prescription medication, has a side effect or life gets in the way. If we can see the warning signs and intervene quickly with a doctor, nurse or whoever is the right level of clinical expertise, that could have a profound impact. When appropriate permissions and safeguards are in place, connecting relevant information across a person’s care experience can help create a more coordinated and personalized experience. We take privacy, security and responsible stewardship of health information incredibly seriously, and technology should enhance, not replace, the relationship between patients and clinicians.
Virtual care cannot treat every condition. Where should the handoff between virtual and in-person care happen?
It’s condition-specific, and appropriate clinical care transcends the modality. Our goal is not to get you into virtual care and keep you there; it’s to help you navigate the system in a way that meets you where you are in that moment. Take perimenopause and menopause. That journey can start with symptoms you might not even realize are related. A lot of the first steps are lab testing, conversations and trying different medications, and that can be done virtually.
Sometimes you can be fully treated in virtual care; in others, you require specialized care via in-person visits. Care is more about getting patients what they need when and where they need it. You might see your provider for 15 minutes once a year in person, but you have hundreds of health questions throughout the year. In many of those moments, we can help solve the problem, close the loop and still help you navigate the broader system.
