Ferrum Health
“Doctors are going to keep doctoring on the interfaces that they currently use. Trying to rip them out and replace them is a generational task. And when you have the opportunity to deploy tools that, for example, increase the rate of early cancer defection from 31% to 65%, which is an actual data point from one of our facilities, you should deploy it however the heck you can deploy it.”
- Pelu Tran
A two-time digital health founder, Pelu Tran is on a mission to use AI to reduce the impact of medical errors, modernize quality improvement, and improve patient outcomes. His company, Ferrum Health, works directly with hospitals and clinics, serving as a middleware layer that everyone seems to be missing. With over 60 AI vendors, and a number of leading health systems on board, he aims to build the Plaid for healthcare AI.
Our guest investor in this episode is Jeff Hammerbacher, long time angel investor, data scientist, and a Board Member at DataVant, PerkinElmer, and Emids.
We discuss:
Building the middleware layer between providers and AI companies
The biggest pain points today for providers adopting AI tools (and the biggest pain points for the AI companies)
How they make money today, and how he thinks they’ll make money in the future
Taking capital from corporate venture capital (CVC), and how the worst number of CVC investors is one
Meet the Founder
Pelu Tran, Cofounder and CEO of Ferrum Health, 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.
Pelu is Technology Pioneer and Expert Contributor for the World Economic Forum, a Fellow of the UN World Summit on Innovation, a member of Forbes’ Healthcare 30 under 30, and an Aspen Institute Scholar. He has spoken on Voice of America, Stanford Medicine 25, Rock Health Summit, Forbes 30 under 30 Summit, Health 2.0, State of Reform, and Citi Digital Health Forum. He guest lectures at UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Stanford on healthcare leadership and innovation.
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.
Meet the investor
Jeff Hammerbacher is an angel investor, data scientist, and a Board Member at DataVant, PerkinElmer, and Emids. Previously, Jeff was a founder and Chief Scientist of Cloudera, a Founder and Managing Partner at Related Sciences, an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners, manager of the Data team at Facebook, and a fixed income quant at Bear Stearns. He earned his Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.