☕ Coffee Playdate Podcast with Dr. Alexia Gillen

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Alexia Gillen — board-certified family physician, functional medicine practitioner, and founder of Mosaic Medicine in the Black Hills.

Alexia shares her nonlinear career path: from traditional primary care and urgent care leadership to medical information officer roles (including implementing EPIC), multiple rounds of burnout, and ultimately deciding she could no longer stay in a system that didn’t allow her to care for the whole person. After nearly three years away from direct patient care, she took a leap of faith and opened Mosaic Medicine, a functional and integrative clinic focused on weight, hormone, gut, and autoimmune health.

We talk about:

• The hardest identity shift when leaving traditional medicine
• Why real relationships with patients matter more than pure autonomy
• The financial and emotional reality of the first year in private practice
• Learning to delegate and stop being the “rate-limiting step”
• Simple boundary practices
• The book that helped her believe she was enough to put herself out into the world (Worthy by Jamie Kern Lima)
• Practical advice for physicians thinking about starting their own practice

This is an honest, grounded conversation about burnout, reinvention, and building a practice that finally feels aligned.

00:25 – Welcome + coffee talk ☕
03:13 – Alexia’s background & Mosaic Medicine
06:09 – How the idea for Mosaic was born
10:29 – The fear of leaving a steady paycheck
12:31 – The mindset shift that kept her going
13:31 – Biggest challenges & learning to delegate
16:23 – Boundary tip: leaving the laptop at the clinic
17:49 – Would she do her career differently?
20:36 – Advice for physicians starting out
23:37 – Navigating social media & medical truth
24:41 – Book recommendation: Worthy by Jamie Kern Lima
26:14 – Where to find Alexia

Want to learn more about Dr. Alexia Gillen?

• Mosaic Medicine → https://www.mymosaicmedicine.com/
• Instagram → @alexia_gillen
• Facebook → Mosaic Medicine

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✨ — Dr. Olga Deengar, Coach Olga MD © 2026 Coach Olga MD. All rights reserved.