Meet DR GPT™: Dr. Harvey Castro on Patients, Robots, and Who Will Drive AI in Medicine

Key Podcast Moments

• Harvey explains what it was like to run a $2 million monthly payroll as the personal guarantor of his own emergency departments
• Harvey makes the case that the next generation of patients will trust robots over human doctors
• Graham pushes back, and the two debate whether there are still human doctors in 50 years
• Harvey describes the digital twin in his house that told him to skip a flight and get some sleep
• Harvey names the biggest mistake medicine could make with AI, and it is not the one most doctors expect

Most physicians have heard the warnings about trusting AI too much. Far fewer have heard an emergency physician who has made payroll, run the night shift, and built his own AI tools argue that the real danger might run in the other direction. Dr. Harvey Castro has spent years living on both sides of that tension, and he is not shy about where he lands.

In this episode of How I Doctor, Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Harvey, an emergency physician, MBA, and one of the most visible physician voices on AI in healthcare. You may know him as DR GPT™. Before the nickname, Harvey owned and ran freestanding emergency departments in Texas, where he built his own culture around one-stop care and learned what it costs to keep a night shift staffed. He also wrote one of the first medical apps for the iPhone and published a book on ChatGPT in healthcare in the early days of the technology. His advice to physicians is to treat AI output as a draft, not a decision.

Harvey and Graham start with what changes when patients walk in with a ChatGPT first opinion. Harvey worries about bias in the underlying data and about patients treating themselves, but he also shares how he gave his own patients a custom GPT to prepare their questions before visits. From there the conversation widens to AI as a communication tool, including translating discharge instructions across languages and cultures, turning them into coloring books for kids, and coaching physicians on bedside manner. Harvey describes the personal digital twin he built from his wearables, genetics, labs, and medical record, and argues that patients, not institutions, will drive AI adoption.

Later in the conversation Harvey predicts that children raised alongside AI and robots may one day prefer them to human doctors, while Graham asks whether that comes from habit or from doctors falling short. They also talk about disclosure, including Harvey’s idea of a patient Bill of Rights for AI, and the risk of a backlash if a high-profile failure sets adoption back. The episode ends with rapid-fire takes on ambient scribes, agentic AI in the EHR, the biggest mistake medicine could make, and what AI should never touch.

This episode is presented in partnership with eNavvi, a clinician-built digital prescribing platform.

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Top 4 Takeaways

The AI conversation in medicine is often framed as a debate between believers and skeptics. What Harvey describes is something closer to a question of who holds the power, who carries the risk, and how much trust the technology has actually earned.