Risks for startups selling AI to hospitals

John asks about startup risk; Pelu explains hospital onboarding costs, opaque internal expenses, and the difficulty for point solutions to scale.

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Episode notes

Hospitals are flooded with AI pilots, but very few ever become real, scalable solutions. In this episode of MindMakers, host John Kim sits down with Pelu Tran, Co-Founder $ CEO of Ferrum Health, to unpack why AI in healthcare so often fails to move beyond the demo phase, and what it really takes to deploy with impact.

With years of experience deploying clinical AI in some of the most complex, risk-sensitive environments, Pelu argues that the real challenge isn’t in the models themselves, it’s in the infrastructure. He walks through Ferrum’s approach to building with standardized onboarding, secure deployment, and unified oversight, enabling hospitals to adopt AI safely, at scale.

John and Pelu dig into the reasons most hospitals can only support a handful of AI tools per year despite demand from clinicians for hundreds, and why point solutions are rarely sustainable in highly regulated systems. They also explore how Ferrum protects patient data while still driving innovation, the growing problem of Shadow AI, and how new roles like Chief AI Officers are reshaping the org charts of modern healthcare systems.

This episode offers hard-earned lessons for anyone trying to deploy AI in highly-regulated environments where safety and trust are not optional. If you’re thinking about long-term infrastructure, compliance, or the future of strategic AI adoption, you won’t want to miss it.

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Guest Bio

Cofounder and CEO of Ferrum Health, Pelu Tran is a serial healthcare entrepreneur living in San Francisco. Pelu studied both medicine and engineering at Stanford University and was four months away from receiving his MD when he dropped out to start his first company.

As founder of Augmedix, now a publicly traded company, Pelu led the product and commercial teams, growing the company to over 1,000 employees in five countries and $20M in annual revenue from over half of the largest health systems in the US. After watching his uncle pass away from a preventable medical error, Pelu founded Ferrum Health, an enterprise AI deployment platform with the mission of improving patient outcomes by democratizing health systems’ access to the most innovative and impactful clinical AI technologies from around the world.

In his travels working with health systems around the world, you can find him learning about local cultures by trying the street food, listening to local musicians, and skiing, hiking, and diving any wilderness he can find.

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Guest Quote

“You’re never gonna be able to get people to stop adopting technologies that they want to use. So the reality of this is that the job of hospital AI administrators, IT teams, clinical leadership even, is to figure out which tools your doctors need to use to do a good job. And find a way to enable them to use them that is safe, compliant, and secure.” – Pelu Tran

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Time Stamps

00:00 Episode Start

00:45 The unique challenges and opportunities of AI in healthcare

05:25 Roadblocks to widespread AI adoption

07:25 Where regulation fits in to the equation

09:50 The reality that startups and hospitals face today

14:30 What Ferrum is doing differently

18:00 Solving the workforce shortage with AI

22:15 Often overlooked assumptions in regulated AI

24:35 Pelu's lessons for other AI innovators

26:45 Seizing this rare opportunity