Adam Z. Kawalek, MD, is the founder of SickSlip and a board-certified internal medicine physician with 20 years in hospitalist and emergency medicine. A Brown University graduate, he earned his MD with Distinction in Research from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and trained in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai and NYU Langone. He has been on the medical staff at Cedars-Sinai since 2008, served as a faculty hospitalist and Instructor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins through the COVID ICU years, taught second-year medical students at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and served as an Expert Reviewer for the Medical Board of California. His career has been shaped by medicine in hard places: critical care chief physician with International Medical Corps in Haiti in 2010, a rickshaw mobile clinic in India, clinics in Kenya and Liberia, country medical director for the Gaza emergency response in 2014, and emergency departments in rural Alaska, Hawaii and California. Years of watching patients sit in ERs for paperwork, and counting how much physician time it consumed, convinced him that routine documentation was one of healthcare’s last pockets of avoidable utilization. He built SickSlip himself to move it online, and today practices virtual urgent care while licensed in nearly 40 states.
An emergency physician and hospitalist explains how a paperwork problem that followed him across his career became a startup, why he replaced his development team with an AI coding assistant and six lessons for physicians who want to build a business without leaving medicine.
