An emergency physician and chief AI officer, Harvey Castro (DR GPT™) focuses on which tasks medicine should hand to machines and who remains accountable when those machines influence care.
Automate administrative workflows first: Castro argues clinical AI’s earliest useful role is replacing administrative work, not physician judgment.
Hospitals need problem-first AI strategy and five safety protocols before deployment: start with the clinical problem, require clinician input, and implement encryption, human oversight, sandbox testing, bias audits, and patient disclosure.
New AI forms (agentic systems) and context standards (model context protocol) change supervision and integration tasks at the bedside.
He has published 98 essays on KevinMD since January 2023 and has been a guest on The Podcast by KevinMD three times. He published 59 essays in 2023, 18 in 2024, 11 in 2025, and 10 so far in 2026. The 2023 pieces cover ChatGPT's first year in medicine as it happened, including privacy, hallucinations, and whether the tool could ease the physician and nursing shortage.
The physician, and Castro says the profession has not paid attention to the contract language that makes it so. The most common one, in Castro's account, is approving tools before deciding what problem they are meant to solve. He expects verification, more than recall, to be the skill that matters in the next decade, and he writes that a tool should make clinicians better informed without making them less responsible.
He has also written regularly about burnout, resilience, leadership, and what a physician's job becomes once a machine handles recall. In " Clinical AI should replace workflows, not physicians," September 2026, he writes that "the most useful first wave of clinical AI will not replace physician judgment." The work he wants automated is the administrative work that should never have been assigned to physicians. His answer sits among many others on the same question in the KevinMD record on artificial intelligence.
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