There is a moment in complex care when everyone has done their job and the system still fails. The specialist has a plan. The primary-care physician has years of context. The patient has a calendar crowded with appointments. Yet the plan, the context and the calendar do not reliably meet. Vishnukamal “Kamal” Golla has made a career in that space between competent parts.
His route there was not a straight pivot from medicine to management. It was a sequence: a liberal-arts degree at the University of Southern California, an MD and MPH in Houston, six years of urology training at UCLA, then a National Clinician Scholars Program fellowship at Duke. Each stop added another scale of the same problem. First came the individual body. Then the clinical pathway. Then the institution, the payment model and the network that must coordinate care across time.
Today Golla is SVP and CMO of Oncology at Evolent. He also holds a medical faculty appointment in Duke’s Department of Urology and a core faculty role at the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy. Those concurrent identities - clinician, researcher, teacher and executive - explain the shape of his work better than any single title. He is interested in how evidence becomes a decision, how a decision becomes a pathway and how a pathway survives contact with incentives.
01 / The operating system
A surgeon learns to see the whole sequence
Surgery is full of visible action, but much of its quality lives in sequences that happen before and after the procedure. Preparation, diagnosis, the right intervention, discharge and follow-up form one product from the patient’s point of view. Institutions often divide that product into departments. Golla’s later work can be read as an attempt to reassemble it.
During his UCLA residency, he began studying the structure around clinical work. An American Urological Association Residency Research Award supported him in 2018-2019. Duke says he also received the H.H. Lee Surgical Research Award. His research examined where care diverged from guidelines, how prices differed across hospitals and which payment structures might reward better results.
A 2023 paper he co-authored offered independent urology practices a roadmap for the shift to value-based payment. Another examined publicly reported prices for parts of an inpatient evaluation. In 2025, he co-authored an article on bundled payments for prostatectomy. The papers share an operating instinct: a policy becomes real only when a practice can understand who is accountable, what gets counted and where the risk lands.
“My career goal is to transform the healthcare payment and delivery system to drive high quality, affordable healthcare while improving the patient and provider experience.”Vishnukamal Golla, Duke faculty profile
That sentence is unusually balanced. Affordability is paired with quality. Patient experience is paired with provider experience. It rejects the easy version of reform, where one metric improves by silently transferring the burden somewhere else.
02 / The handoff
The missing middle becomes the work
In a 2024 conversation for Evolent, Golla described a familiar coordination failure: a patient’s primary-care physician could not see the cancer treatment plan, while the patient was uncertain which physician was managing overall care. Nobody in that story needed another inspirational slogan. They needed shared information, clear ownership and a reliable handoff.
This is the missing middle. It sits between diagnosis and treatment, specialist and generalist, recommendation and action. Health systems are rich in expert moments and poor at the connective tissue between them. Patients end up serving as the courier, project manager and memory layer for a network they did not design.
Roughly one in three patients is referred by a primary-care provider to a specialist, a figure Golla highlighted when discussing why coordination cannot be treated as an edge case.
Golla’s answer is not simply more software. He talks about navigation as an extension of the care team: people and tools that help translate a plan into the next useful action. On the Empowered Patient Podcast in 2025, he described how navigation could become more adaptive, using the phrase “precision navigation.” The concept borrows the logic of individualized treatment and applies it to support. Different people need different kinds of help at different points; a static checklist cannot see the difference.
The idea carries a sharp product lesson. Complexity should be absorbed by the service, not exported to the person using it. A strong navigation layer knows where someone is in a journey, what should happen next and when a human should intervene. It does not replace expertise. It helps expertise arrive at the right moment.
03 / Incentives
Payment is part of the product
Care coordination is easy to endorse and hard to finance. Fee-for-service models pay naturally for visible interventions. The quiet work of answering a question, reconciling a plan or preventing an avoidable escalation can be harder to fund. That is why Golla’s research and executive work keep circling back to payment.
A payment model is not merely an accounting choice. It decides which work becomes economically visible. It assigns responsibility and time horizon. When an organization carries meaningful risk for a full journey, it has a reason to invest in navigation, analytics and prevention. When it is paid for isolated events, the connections can remain nobody’s line item.
On the Health Care Rounds podcast, Golla argued for retiring “blunt instruments” aimed at short-term savings. He placed quality first when discussing expensive therapies - first, second and third, in the program’s summary of his remarks. The ordering matters. Cost management without clinical logic can produce a cheaper fragment and a worse whole.
Value-based care, in his telling, is not a discount program. It is a design for making the whole journey accountable. That requires evidence-based pathways, data that crosses settings, provider engagement and the practical ability to act before a problem becomes an expensive event. It also requires patience: the payoff from a well-coordinated journey may appear later than a quarterly utilization target.
The overlooked product is often the guide between expert moments.
04 / The operator
A coherent career can look wide
Golla’s public titles have changed quickly. In 2024 he appeared as Evolent’s Senior Medical Director for Value Transformation. By 2025, industry programs listed him as Vice President of Clinical Technology and Performance. His current remit is SVP and CMO of Oncology. The progression moves from designing models, to building the clinical technology and performance layer, to responsibility for an entire specialty.
The résumé is broad, but the question is stable. How do you align financial incentives with outcomes that matter to patients? At Duke, he framed that as a career goal. In research, he tested pieces of it through quality measures, pricing and payment. In public interviews, he translated it into coordination and navigation. At Evolent, the question becomes operational: contracts, tools, pathways and provider relationships all have to agree.
That consistency may be the most useful thing to borrow from his path. Breadth is not the same as drift. A career can cross professions and institutions if each move provides a new instrument for the same durable problem. Golla learned the clinical language of evidence, the surgical discipline of sequencing, the policy language of incentives and the operator’s respect for implementation.
In 2026, the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care named him to its 40 Under 40 in Cancer class, selected from a field the organization said included 2,800 nominees. The recognition lands at a revealing point. He is no longer only studying the system or advising its edges. He is responsible for making a version of it work.
His publication record also shows how many kinds of evidence that work consumes. One study followed telehealth patterns in primary and onco-primary care. Others examined rural hospital prices, quality measures reported by urologists and the design of procedure bundles. These are not interchangeable questions, but they belong to the same map. They show where people enter a system, what organizations charge, what clinicians report and how money might follow an episode rather than a single task.
The institutional connections matter, too. At Duke, Golla worked across urology, the Margolis policy center, the clinical research institute, translational-science infrastructure and the Durham VA. That is a lot of boundaries for one research agenda to cross. It also mirrors the environment his operating work must address. Complex care is not owned by one profession. Its design emerges from clinicians, researchers, technologists, payers and provider groups learning to act on a shared picture.
The ambition remains larger than a title. Specialty care is growing more capable and more complicated at the same time. Each new option can create another decision, another handoff and another place for context to disappear. The next generation of care will need expertise, but it will also need connective tissue worthy of that expertise.
Golla’s work proposes a practical order: start with evidence. Design the pathway. Build navigation around the person. Align payment with the result. Then measure what happened and begin again. The sequence is not flashy. It is a way to make many good parts behave like one system.