I am Harvey Castro, MD, MBA, an emergency physician who still takes shifts. As DR GPT™, I work at the front of healthcare AI as a keynote speaker, TEDx speaker, author, and advisor to boards and executive teams. For the last several years I have put AI where the stakes are real, from the ER floor to monitoring astronaut health where there is no doctor to call. If it holds up there, it holds up on your floor. If your last AI pilot looked incredible in the demo and quietly died in the workflow, that is the problem I solve.
About
Your clinicians do not distrust AI. They distrust AI that was never tested where they actually work.
With over two decades of experience as a physician, entrepreneur, and CEO of 8 free-standing ERs, a medical billing and physician staffing company, he has become a driving force for change. He is a bilingual emergency physician, healthcare AI speaker and educator under the DR GPT™ brand, and currently advises the CEO of Phantom Space.
He has developed more than 30 iPhone apps and given more than 150 live television interviews. He helps leaders adopt AI thoughtfully in clinical and operational settings, bridging technology and health care while keeping physicians in the loop. A graduate of UTMB and Texas A&M based in Dallas, Texas, he writes and speaks as an educational futurist on the future of medicine.
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About · DR GPT™
The short version
I am Harvey Castro, MD, MBA. Most people know me as DR GPT™. I am a board-certified emergency physician who still takes shifts, Advisor to the CEO of Phantom Space, and a healthcare AI keynote speaker. I have written more than forty-five books on artificial intelligence in medicine and given five TEDx talks.
How I got here
I started in the US Army Reserve as a dental assistant. Eight years, E4 Specialist. Then Texas A&M, then medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, then emergency medicine residency at St. Luke's University Health Network in Bethlehem.
Twenty-plus years followed on the front lines. Parkland Hospital. Medical City. Elite Care. The Colony ER Hospital. Along the way I built more than thirty medical apps, founded and ran an emergency medicine company, and picked up a Physician Executive MBA from the University of Tennessee because I kept finding myself in rooms where clinical training was not the constraint.
Dental assistant to emergency physician to advisor to a rocket company CEO. None of it was a plan. Each step was a response to something the last one could not solve.
Why artificial intelligence
In January 2023, about six weeks after ChatGPT became public, I published a book about what it meant for medicine. Almost no practicing physician was writing about it yet. That timing is the whole story of the last three years for me.
What I care about is narrower than it sounds. Not whether AI will change medicine, which is settled. What I want to know is what a clinician still owes a patient when a model is in the room, how you tell a tool that helps from one that only looks like it helps, and what happens to a workforce that stops practicing the thing the machine now does.
That is the talk I give, and it is the reason I keep taking shifts. A physician who was on the floor last month tells a different story about alert fatigue than one who read about it.
Space and medicine
I advise the CEO of Phantom Space on artificial intelligence strategy. My lane is the one I know as an emergency physician: what happens to a person when the nearest doctor is hours away, or in orbit and out of reach. The same problem shows up in a rural clinic with no specialist and on a mission with no hospital. Monitoring, early warning and sound judgment at the edge matter in both places.
I made that case at TEDxSouthlake, in a talk about how AI, satellites and edge computing can keep your doctor close. I do not discuss company plans, contracts or patent work in public. I am glad to speak on space health and what it teaches medicine on Earth.
The work now
I keynote for hospital boards, health systems, medical conferences, pharma and medtech teams, and universities, in English and Spanish. I advise boards on AI governance and risk. I write, constantly, including AI in Emergency Medicine with Wiley and the second edition of AI and Healthcare with Routledge.
I served on the Singapore Ministry of Health's Health Regulatory Advisory Panel from 2024 to 2026, and I advise NeuroCare.AI. I sit on three editorial boards: AI in Precision Oncology, The American Journal of Healthcare Strategy, and HealthManagement.org.
Clinical
Board-certified in emergency medicine. Twenty-plus years, still practicing.
Current role
Advisor to the CEO of Phantom Space Corporation. From the ER to orbit.
Speaking
Five TEDx talks. HIMSS Europe and HIMSS AI. Stages across Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia.
Writing
Over forty-five books, publishing with Wiley, Routledge and KDP.
Recognition
Ranked #1, Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders in Healthcare 2026. Offcall Top AI Healthcare Voices #24. D Magazine ER Doctor of the Year, 2014 to 2022.
Languages
English and Spanish, native and bilingual.
Where to find the record
Everything above is checkable. My ORCID iD is 0009-0005-7953-325X, my research profile is on Google Scholar, and the DR GPT™ entity is catalogued on Wikidata as Q141445647. I write regularly for KevinMD and on Substack.
