Physician and writer
Passing the test isn't the same as being good.
Sarah Gebauer, MD, is a practicing anesthesiologist and palliative care physician, trained at Stanford and UCSF. She ran quality at her hospital, then helped lead RAND's work testing frontier AI models. She now writes about how we judge whether a doctor, or a machine, is good enough.
About
Dr. Gebauer's work sits where patient care meets measurement. As a clinician she has seen how hospitals, boards and online reviews grade doctors. As a researcher she has tested some of the most powerful AI models in use today. Her question is the same in both places: does the test measure what matters?
She writes and speaks about:
- How hospitals, boards and online reviews grade doctors, and what they miss
- How to tell whether a clinical AI tool is safe and actually works
- Why we grade doctors and AI on the easy stuff, and what it would take to measure what matters
- What patients can ask to find out whether their doctor is any good
Book in progress
Is Your Doctor Any Good?
A guide for patients on what quality in medicine really means and how to find it.
Selected writing
- Nature, 2024 AI could pose pandemic-scale biosecurity risks. Here's how to make it safer Co-authored with Jaspreet Pannu, Greg McKelvey Jr., Anita Cicero and Tom Inglesby
- Machine Learning for MDs, October 2026 Your AI System Passed. But What Was the Test?
- Machine Learning for MDs, January 2026 Why Single Benchmarks Fail: The Case for Evaluation Suites
- KevinMD, September 2019 Should doctors take more responsibility for quality metrics?
More in her newsletter, Machine Learning for MDs, and in her KevinMD essays.
Podcasts and interviews
- The Emergency Mind Podcast, June 2026 Sarah Gebauer on Trust, Failure, and AI Governance
- Designing for Health, March 2026 Sarah Gebauer, MD: Physician and AI Model Evaluation Expert With Dr. Craig Joseph
- Ardexia Podcast, November 2025 The Conversation Every Healthcare Leader Needs to Hear About AI With Dr. Aditi Joshi
- The Visible Voices Podcast, 2025 Who's Responsible When AI Gets It Wrong? Medical Liability in the Age of AI
Speaking and press
Dr. Gebauer gives talks and interviews and comments on doctor quality and healthcare AI, in person or by video. Editors and producers hear back within two business days.
Invite her to speak