About Validara Health
Validara Health was founded on a simple insight: most healthcare AI failures are predictable when clinical reality is part of the evaluation. We analyze real-world cases of patient harm, workflow breakdowns, and regulatory risk to identify failure patterns early. Our clinical expertise turns assumptions of safety into evidence.
Sarah Gebauer, MD
Founder, Validara Health
Sarah Gebauer is a practicing anesthesiologist and one of the few physicians with deep knowledge at the intersection of clinical medicine, AI evaluation, and healthcare governance.
Before founding Validara Health, she served as a Senior Physician Researcher at the RAND Corporation, where she evaluated frontier AI systems for national security risks related to safety, reliability, and real-world performance.
Her work focuses on getting effective AI tools into clinical practice faster by helping companies build products that clinicians will actually use and patients will actually benefit from. She writes about healthcare AI governance on her Substack, where she's built a following among physicians, developers, and health system leaders navigating this space.
Dr Gebauer founded Validara Health after realizing that the same frameworks she used at RAND to evaluate AI for national security risks translated directly to healthcare. The failure modes were familiar. The implementation challenges were similar. And the stakes - patient lives - were just as high.
She believes AI has enormous potential to improve patient care, but only if we implement it thoughtfully. Too many promising tools stall or fail because clinical reality wasn't part of the design process early enough. Validara exists to change that equation - bringing physician expertise into AI development so that good ideas become products that actually reach patients and make a difference.
Background & Credentials
She believes AI has enormous potential to improve patient care, but only if we implement it thoughtfully. Too many promising tools stall or fail because clinical reality wasn't part of the design process early enough. Validara exists to change that equation - bringing physician expertise into AI development so that good ideas become products that actually reach patients and make a difference.
Her clinical career has spanned leadership roles including Perioperative Service Line Chair and Medical Director of Data and Quality. She founded the first palliative care clinic in Northwest Colorado and ran a pain clinic serving a rural community. She continues to practice anesthesiology because she believes staying close to patient care keeps her perspective grounded.
Before medicine, she worked at Bain & Company - an experience that shaped how she thinks about operations, strategy, and organizational change.
Over the past seven years, she has consulted for more than 100 health technology companies on clinical strategy, workflow integration, and product development. Her work has been published in academic journals and book chapters, and she's been featured on podcasts and as an invited speaker at industry conferences.
Our Clinical Expert Collective
We've curated a rare group of physicians with deep expertise at the intersection of healthcare and AI. These specialists bring methodological rigor in health services research, clinical informatics expertise, and domain-specific clinical practice to validation projects. This network enables rapid consultation across data science, implementation science, and specialty-specific clinical questions.
