By: Gwynne Jelbaoui, FHIMSS

Dr. Kowalczyk, a practicing gastroenterologist, health tech entrepreneur, and Executive Medical Director of Provation Medical, is the May Physician Committee member we would like to spotlight.

Some of you may recognize Dr. Kowalczyk from last year’s HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum where he spoke about AI Agents, AI-enabled workforces, and best practices in deployment. He also spoke at the HIMSS AI Leadership Strategy Summit, where he spoke about similar topics as well as the ROI of AI. I am grateful to work with him as he now serves on the HIMSS Physician Committee. He has been a contributing member to the monthly meetings and is involved in our first two areas of focus: governance for AI-enabled digital transformation, and scalability and measurable ROI with AI implementation. I have already learned so much from him and look forward to learning more and sharing this knowledge with the broader community. Below are his thoughts on a few industry-trending topics.

Learn more about the HIMSS Physician Committee here.

HIMSS: How can physician leaders help ensure that new technologies are not just innovative, but practical and sustainable in real-world workflows?

Dr. Kowalczyk: Master the workflow of decision delivery first and the technology becomes unstoppable. That's how you scale.

Value in healthcare isn't created at the moment of clinical decision. It's created in how that decision gets delivered across the system. Physician leaders who map the actual workflow before evaluating any technology give their organizations an insurmountable advantage. They know where value is lost, where coordination breaks down, and exactly where AI can support execution. That's not caution. That's the foundation every sustainable deployment is built on.

HIMSS: How can physicians play a more strategic role in shaping technology decisions at the organizational or policy level?

Dr. Kowalczyk: When physicians speak strategy AND workflow, they don't just influence technology decisions — they lead them.

The physician who can connect a clinical problem to an enterprise goal, map it to a workflow failure, and frame the solution in terms of measurable board-visible outcomes is not a subject matter expert. They are strategic architects. That physician walks into any technology conversation — with a CFO, a board, a policy committee — and sets the terms. That’s the clinical enterprise value stack. Fluency in that full stack is the new physician leadership credential.

HIMSS: How can physician voices help ensure that digital innovation ultimately advances personalized, patient-centered care?

Dr. Kowalczyk: When AI knows the numbers and physicians know what matters, patients get care that actually sees them. That's the whole point.

A fundamental truth I’ve seen building software – Great operations equal great care. But that equation only holds when the workflows being optimized carry both clinical data and human context forward. Physicians are the translation layer that ensures technology serves the patient, not just the process. When physician voices are embedded in workflow design, evaluation architecture, and outcome measurement, personalized care stops being a marketing promise and becomes a system capability. That is the future worth building, and physicians are the ones who make it real.

HIMSS: What does responsible AI adoption look like from the front lines of care delivery?

Dr. Kowalczyk: ICredential your AI like you credential your clinicians. That's not caution — that's confidence at scale.

You don't grant a resident unsupervised autonomy on day one. You build a trust pathway with defined milestones, real-world validation, and the standing authority to pull back when performance degrades. AI deserves identical rigor. Building AI evaluation stacks creates that pathway, graduating AI from assistive to autonomous only when real-world behavior earns it. Front-line clinician instinct is a critical input in that process, not an obstacle to it. Organizations that build this credentialing discipline don't just adopt AI responsibly. They scale it confidently.