50% Of Patients Have Uncontrolled Blood Pressure! Dr. Eve Cunningham

Dr. Eve Cunningham never planned to leave the delivery room. She was a practicing OBGYN — delivering babies, doing surgery, building her family — until a conversation with a Microsoft exec pulled her into virtual care leadership right as Covid forced Providence Health to move its entire clinical operation online in a single week.

That crash course became a career. Today Dr. Cunningham is Chief Medical Officer at Cadence, an AI-powered technology and care delivery company that just raised $100M and now works with 25+ health systems and over 120,000 patients. In this Inspiring Women conversation, host Laurie McGraw sits down with her to unpack how Cadence goes beyond passive monitoring — actually titrating medications, ordering labs, and triaging patients remotely on a health system's behalf.

They cover why roughly half of hypertension patients are poorly controlled, why a single office blood pressure reading is often misleading ("white coat hypertension"), and how trend-based data lets clinicians safely up- and down-titrate medications for frail, older patients. Dr. Cunningham also explains why simplicity — no apps, no passwords, no Bluetooth pairing — is the reason over 70% of Cadence's senior patients self-activate their devices without ever calling for help.

IN THIS EPISODE:

- Why 50% of hypertension patients are not in good control

- How Cadence intervenes on hypertension, diabetes, and heart failure remotely

- The "white coat hypertension" problem and why trends beat single readings

- Why 70%+ of patients self-activate devices with zero tech support

- How Covid forced Providence Health to go virtual in a week

- Building and selling a clinical decision support tool, Med Pearl

- Why remote monitoring lets PCPs manage ~100 more patients per panel

- Advice for clinicians moving into health tech leadership