Byron Crowe, M.D. believes artificial intelligence will never replace clinicians, even while it becomes the default producer of most clinical reasoning. “A doctor is a moral agent,” he says, “not a technocrat.”
AI will handle clinical and cognitive reasoning tasks, but clinicians will need to cultivate what he calls “judgement under uncertainty.” To Crowe, Chief Medical Officer of medical AI platform Doctronic, that’s a uniquely human trait.
Crowe drives development of Doctronic’s care model and shepherds the company’s clinical strategy. A recent pilot program in Utah, for example, allows patients to refill certain prescriptions through an AI interface that asks questions, documents a patient’s history, and then recommends refills for a doctor’s review. The Utah pilot is free for patients. But Crowe knows that for AI use to expand, reimbursements are key. That’s why Crowe advocates for policies to allow medical AI to integrate with existing systems so payers, including the government, can fund its use in clinical settings.
Crowe has long been fascinated by systems, especially how technology can innovate across medicine Before joining Doctronic in 2025, he was the CMO of digital health platform Solera Health, which links both payers and employees with digital health providers. While on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, he researched how AI could integrate with medical care. He also co-founded the nonprofit Healthcare by Design in 2020, which focused on human-centered design in clinical care environments. He currently holds a faculty appointment at Stanford University as a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, focusing on improving complex systems at scale.
Crowe earned his M.D. from the Emory University School of Medicine, where he was president of the Emory Cycle & Triathlon Club, and earned his Master’s in clinical informatics management from Stanford University. He is board-certified in both internal medicine and clinical informatics, and was named one of Modern Healthcare’s “40 Under 40” innovators.
Dozens of Crowe’s articles and papers have been featured in journals, including JAMA, and he often writes about AI in the medical world in his Substack, “Always On Call.” He’ll share his views on the promise and tools of medical AI today at DOC 2026 in the session “Medical AI — Rubber Meets Road,” joining Travis Zack, M.D., Ph.D., and DOC curator Jordan Shlain, M.D.
We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Crowe to the DOC 2026 Faculty.