With more than 20 years’ experience in building healthcare startups, Rushika Fernandopulle, MD, is a veteran in the physician entrepreneur world. But he never set out to be one.
“I thought I was just going to be a doctor,” he said with a laugh. “I became an entrepreneur because I had tried everything else.”
That “everything else” was a series of attempts, as an internist, to fix what he saw as a broken primary care system.
“I tried working for a big health system and serving on a bunch of committees until I realized it was a waste of time. They didn't really want to change,” Dr. Fernandopulle said.
So he tried his hand in the policy world. He also worked for a consulting company for a while. He even worked in academia to study the problem. But Dr. Fernandopulle could never find a way of creating the changes he had in mind.
“I had even gone around to all the big health systems in town and said, ‘I've got these ideas of how to create a new model of primary care from scratch. Will you let me do it within your health system?’” he recalled. “They all gave me some version of, ‘That's really interesting, but our practices are full. We're making money. What's the problem?’ And I said, ‘Care stinks—patients hate it, docs hate it and it’s bankrupting the country.’ But it became clear those weren't their problems.”
That’s when Dr. Fernandopulle decided he would just have to leap outside the box. Soon after, he founded Renaissance Health, which billed itself as “the rebirth of primary care.”
“Every entrepreneur has this brave moment when you realize you have to quit your day job and do it yourself. “That was mine,” Dr. Fernandopulle said in an interview ahead of his presentation at the AMA Physician Entrepreneur Forum, Aug. 7–8, at the Association’s Chicago headquarters.
The AMA Physician Entrepreneur Forum will feature more than a dozen healthcare leaders who have built successful businesses, practices and ventures. The forum, for which registration is closed, is just one part of the AMA Career Advancement Collective, a powerful suite of educational programs and training will help physicians develop and advance at every stage of their career.
These include the:
- AMA Independent Practice Accelerator Workshop, Sept. 11–12.
- AMA Peer Support Workshop, Oct. 28–29.
- AMA Physician Leadership Academy, a 12-month hybrid program that combines in-person and virtual learning, Oct. 7, 2026–Sept. 22, 2027.
Learn more and register for one of these career-shaping events now.
Small beginnings, big future
While Dr. Fernandopulle’s entrepreneurial start was just a single physician practice with the mission of building a new model of primary care delivery, it evolved into Iora Health, which, after about 10 years, was sold to One Medical for some $2.1 billion. That company later became part of Amazon.
His latest startup is Liza Health, where he is CEO. Liza Health is the modern-day expression of his longstanding professional goal to reinvent the primary care experience. What makes it different from his other ventures is its embrace of augmented intelligence (AI), often referred to as artificial intelligence. The aim, he said, is to have AI tools that help physicians focus on what they do best and make primary care work better for everybody.
“I never planned to be an entrepreneur,” he said. “It just seemed like the only way to actually do what I wanted to get done.”
In his interview with the AMA, Dr. Fernandopulle laid out four pieces of advice for physicians who have big ideas for healthcare but aren’t sure how to get started.
Pick a problem you're passionate about
Some people, he noted, are only vaguely interested in a problem. But that won’t cut it.
“You need to really feel it in your bones—you have to want to solve a particular problem,” he said. “For me, the problem is that the primary care model sucks and we need a better one.”
It can be a long road, Dr. Fernandopulle noted.
“Iora was at least a 10-year journey; 20 years if we add up everything,” he said.
Build before you're ready
There's a quote attributed to Ray Bradbury that Dr. Fernandopulle is fond of: “You’ve got to jump off the cliff ... and build your wings on the way down.”
“If you wait until you have all the answers, it, you'll never jump. So don't be risk averse,” Dr. Fernandopulle said. “If you think you've got a great problem you're interested in solving, realize that you don't need to be risk averse at some point. You just have to do it. Jump in and you'll figure it out.”
Acknowledge your expertise
“There are plenty of nonphysicians—MBA types—who are trying to build medical businesses,” Dr. Fernandopulle said. “And I think the problem is they don't understand fundamentally why it's so hard, because they don't see patients every day.”
“I think it's just so important to have the perspective we have, as docs, of seeing real patients,” he said. “I think it's really important that we don't let this stuff happen to us and become slaves of the machine. We have to actually drive the change.”
Besides participating in a panel discussion of the future of physician entrepreneurism, Dr. Fernandopulle—a veteran of six rounds of venture capital funding—will judge a pitch contest for attendees at the AMA Physician Entrepreneur Forum.
Just do it
Dr. Fernandopulle has observed that many physicians seem risk averse. He encourages physicians to recognize that their credentials provide a reliable fallback if their entrepreneurial ideas ever fall through.
“What I tell young docs is, you—of all people in the world—should not be risk averse because you can always get a job,” he said. “I can pick up the phone right now and in 10 minutes get a job that pays me really well.”
“The worst thing that happens is you go get a job,” he said. “You have this huge safety net. You're never going to starve.”
