Company leader
David Craig
Chief Executive Officer
Spruce Health
David Craig, MD, is chief executive of Spruce Health, a San Francisco, California, company whose inbox handles phone, text, fax, video, and team chat for medical practices.
A Programmer Turned Physician
He was into programming and web development as a teenager, long before he thought about medicine. At Stanford University he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in biology, and after his junior year he decided to become a doctor, partly, by his account, during a five-hour binge of old Scrubs episodes. "I wanted to be a doctor, and I wanted to develop tools that could extend and magnify the capabilities of medicine," he wrote. He earned his MD at Stanford in 2011 and finished an emergency medicine residency at Stanford and Kaiser Permanente in 2014.
From Medical Director to Chief Executive
At the end of residency he looked for a small startup with engineering and company-building skills, and was introduced to Spruce founder Ray Bradford. He joined in 2014 as medical director, running the physician network and clinical algorithms for its telemedicine clinic. When Spruce shifted to its communication software, he became chief medical officer and director of compliance, and he took over as chief executive in December 2021. He still works clinically as an emergency physician in the San Francisco Bay Area.