On/Offcall: Here Are The Top AI Doctors in Healthcare, Nominated by the Offcall Community

Welcome back to On/Offcall!

🚨 This week, we were excited to welcome Dr. Michael Pfeffer on How I Doctor. 👏

Dr. Pfeffer is Stanford Health Care's Chief Information Officer and a practicing hospitalist, which means he builds AI tools in the morning and uses them on patients in the afternoon. How is one of the leaders of one of America's top health systems using AI to change medicine? And what have they learned along the way? Where should this technology go next?

Dr. Pfeffer makes the case that the goal shouldn’t be to adopt more AI tools. It should be to let AI handle the busywork so physicians can keep the judgment calls that are actually theirs.

Dr. Pfeffer and Dr. Graham Walker dig into all of it.

Listen to the episode out now

Top AI Healthcare Voices in 2026: Nominated By YOU

After we asked who you would nominate as a top AI in healthcare voice, the Offcall community stepped up and nominated so many incredible healthcare leaders who are helping to shape the future of AI in medicine.

Featuring: Yubin Park, Prem Natarajan, Thomas Kelly, Ami Bhatt, King Pascual, Mike Prokop, Sanjay Basu, Jesse Pines, Anita Samuel, Michael Howell, Sanjay Juneja, Hans Van Lancker, Pierre Elias, Kevin Brandstetter, Benjamin Schwartz, Connor Yost, and Peter J. Embí

Celebrate them on social media and see the full list here!

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Physician Spotlight: Meet Stav Devons-Sberro

Have a response for Dr. Devons-Sberro? Reply to this post directly — she’ll personally read every message. Also, let us know who we should feature next by replying directly to this post!

1. Stav, what’s one task you’ve fully handed off to AI that you’d never take back? Having it review the grammar and wording of my formal writing. As someone who is not US-based, and for whom English is only my father tongue :), there was always a small but very real anxiety around professional correspondence. I always worried I might miss something — a phrase, a convention, a commonly used term — and somehow come across as less professional than I actually am. In the past, when I had to correspond formally with professional or official bodies, I would check everything 10 times. Today, it has honestly become a non-issue for me. In that sense, AI has been a very meaningful barrier-remover. Now you’ll have to guess how much of this answer was written by me and how much by AI. (Hint: I have a much better sense of humor…)

2. What’s something you used to judge other physicians for that you now completely understand? I used to be more judgmental of physicians who set very firm boundaries around patients’ access to them. In medical school, we were taught to admire doctors who gave everything to the profession: the ones who shared their personal phone number, were always available, and sacrificed huge parts of their own well-being for their patients. We saw that as the highest form of dedication.

So when we met a physician who wouldn’t stay another 10 minutes in clinic for a patient who arrived late, or who insisted that patients contact them only through the office, it felt strange. Maybe even cold. Now I completely understand it. This work is deeply draining. And we should also be honest, many patients do not always appreciate that kind of availability and sacrifice. Some even take advantage of it. Those boundaries are not necessarily about arrogance or not caring. Sometimes they are simply the very reasonable expression of an adult who understands their priorities in life.

3. What’s something physicians are quietly worried about that the public doesn’t know about yet? How long can we hold on? “How long can we keep up like this?” I think the public knows that physicians are burned out, and that the profession has become increasingly difficult. But I’m still not sure people understand just how much.

I know quite a few physicians who are genuinely afraid of being “the last ones to leave.” Every few days, you hear about someone else who left, switched to a different role, reduced their clinical hours, or found a way to be a little less inside the system. And all the talk about technology eventually replacing us does not exactly help here. There is this quiet but very real fear among doctors of missing the train. Of being the last one still standing on the ward after everyone else has already understood something you haven’t, that maybe they should have left earlier.

4. If you had a magic wand for one thing in medicine — not your whole career, just one thing — what would you fix tomorrow? I would fix the residency Match — or more precisely, the way we decide who gets into which specialty, and where.

Not only because residency itself is hard — though it absolutely is, especially when it often overlaps with the years of building a family, and unsurprisingly, that burden does not fall equally on women. But because residency selection exposes a deeper problem: we still don’t really know how to define what makes someone a good doctor. We know how to measure exam scores, which often test memory, speed, and recall. We know how to conduct interviews in an artificial, high-pressure setting. We know how to be impressed by recommendation letters, CVs, and someone’s ability to present themselves well. But most of us know that this is not necessarily what makes a good physician.

So we do not have good enough tools to evaluate candidates for residency. And when the tools are not good enough, opportunities do not always go to the people best suited for them. The amazing part is that we copied this exact problem almost perfectly into AI.

We started by testing models like medical students: multiple-choice questions, then something a bit closer to OSCEs, then clinical simulations. And then we get frustrated, rightly, when tech companies claim that because a model answered more questions correctly than physicians, it can replace them. We say “wait, that tells us almost nothing about how it would function as a doctor in the real world!”

And that is completely true. But maybe it is also a mirror. If we still don’t really know how to measure what makes a good human doctor, maybe we shouldn’t be so shocked that we are also measuring AI doctors in all the wrong ways.

Read the full-length version here. Know someone else who should be featured? Reply or tag them and their company in the comments!

4 Things to Read This Week

Physician Attrition Isn’t a Result of Lack of Commitment (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
New op-ed from Dr. Priya Mammen: “Rep. Murphy wants aspiring physicians to commit 25 years to clinical medicine. But no hospital system, no academic institution, no corporate owner, no congressman is being asked to make that commitment back.”

In Our Dog Eat Dog Medical Culture, Physicians Lose (MedPage Today)
New op-ed from Santoshi Billakota (h/t Christie Mulholland): “The future of medicine depends on physicians finding ways to collaborate, support one another, and advocate collectively for our profession and our patients. This conversation is especially important as more doctors face burnout, loss of autonomy, and increasing administrative burdens.“ Also see this commentary from Dr. Michael Suk in response.

Direct Primary Care: Is It Right for You? (Medical Economics)
With Dr. Maryal Concepcion: “How can this be the way that physicians are exposed to the way that medicine is done? There has to be another way.”

When Medicine Gets Too Heavy, Find What Lifts You Up (Medscape)
Featuring Omotola K. Ajibade, Lance VanGundy, and Julie A. Augenstein: “Any creative activity, detached from the stressors of the medical world, can lower risks for psychological issues such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But spending time specifically focused on hopeful or positive moments can have a profound impact.

Highlights From Our Community

Her doors are open, Kristen Wolfe
Dr. Kristen Wolfe announced she is opening the doors of her new practice Evermore Women’s Health in Longmont, CO to provide women with thoughtful, evidence-based care that evolves with them through midlife and beyond. Learn more and follow the practice here!

Important post, Alexander Rivero
Dr. Alexander Rivero shared an important post about one of the most important risks associated with AI: deskilling. “A medical student presented a dizzy patient to me last week, and when I asked for them differential they told me they'd already run it past an LLM. Vestibular migraine. Reasonable answer, probably even right. So I asked them to name three other things it could be and talk me out of each one... things went silent.” Read it here.

Follow their new podcast, Rebecca Berens and Sonia Singh
Dr. Rebecca Berens and Dr. Sonia Singh started a new podcast called The Antisocial Doctors that aims to dispel social media health myths and educate patients. Check it out and follow the podcast here!

Congrats Hannah Ramrakhiani
Hannah Ramrakhiani announced she will be starting at UCSF School of Medicine this fall! Congratulate her here.

Heartfelt congrats, Sherma Morton
Dr. Sherma Morton announced that her daughter graduated as valedictorian of her class and will be attending Duke University. Watch and congratulate her here.

Well done, Ekta Gupta!
Dr. Ekta Gupta received recognition from the Johns Hopkins Surgery Center Series for Exemplary Service as Medical Director of the Knoll North Ambulatory Surgery Center! Congratulate her here!

2025 PHYSICIANS AI REPORT

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✓Complete quantitative breakdown of what physicians really think about AI

✓Strategic implications for healthcare organizations and AI companies

✓Sentiment analysis of physician attitudes about AI and the future

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