Cadence Conversations

Rural healthcare as the proving ground for scale

Episode Notes

Join host Eve Cunningham, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Cadence, in conversation with Dave Newman, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Virtual Care at Sanford Health.

Sanford Health is the largest rural health system in the United States, serving more than two million patients across a multi-state region in the upper Midwest. In this episode, Eve and Dave explore what rural healthcare reveals about innovation that actually scales, and why some of the most advanced care models in the country are being built far from major urban centers.

Their conversation focuses on:

• Why rural health systems are often the best environments for scaling innovation 
• How Sanford has leveraged virtual care to extend specialist access across vast geographies and address workforce shortages
• What it looks like to lead digital transformation while continuing to practice medicine, and why staying close to the bedside matters
• How technologies like ambient documentation and AI-enabled workflows are changing clinician experience and patient connection
• Why innovation without workforce strategy fails, and what sustainable virtual care actually requires
• The myths the industry still gets wrong about rural patients, technology adoption, and access

Patient examples in this episode are anonymized or illustrative. Metrics discussed may be internal. 

For more information on Cadence, visit

 https://www.cadence.care/