Meet The Disruptors: Pelu Tran Of Ferrum Health On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Take care of your employees. There are plenty of rational reasons to do this, from cost of turnover to institutional knowledge, but at the end of the day, these are people who trust us with their livelihood and time, and who believe in our company’s mission more than anybody else.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Pelu Tran.

Pelu is a serial healthcare entrepreneur who 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, Augmedix. 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 in 2018, 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. Today, more than 500,000 unique patient records have been clearly analyzed via the Ferrum platform. Pelu is Technology Pioneer and expert contributor for the World Economic Forum, a Fellow of the UN World Summit on Innovation, and a member of Forbes’ Healthcare 30 under 30, and more. He also guest lectures at UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Stanford on healthcare leadership and innovation. Pelu would be a valuable contributor to this series because he’s has built his company on disrupting the status quo of healthcare technology.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I am originally from New Jersey and grew up with parents who had immigrated to the US. I attended Stanford to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in engineering, and continued on to med school.

Fast forward to 2018, I was 6 years into building my first company to over 1,000 people, with the support from strategic investors like McKesson, Sutter Health and CommonSpirit Health. During that time, I was also spending hours every week helping my family navigate my uncle’s late-stage lung cancer — a terminal condition that should have been treated years earlier, but had been missed by his physicians until it was too late.

I knew that there were dozens of AI tools that could have identified the medical error that led to my uncle’s death, but none of them were being used then, and few are being utilized even today. I saw then that healthcare leaders needed a trustworthy partner to help them keep up with the pace of and new AI disease diagnosis technology, and could deploy solutions to protect patients like my uncle before their lives and healthcare journeys become just another unfortunate statistic.

I approached my friend Ken, knowing his unique skill set could support me in starting a business to combat these medical misses. Together we founded Ferrum Health to manage the technological complexity of securely deploying new applications in health systems to support their patients, allowing healthcare leaders to focus on what they do best — delivering care. We believed this was the future of radiology.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

Studies highlighting radiology malpractice statistics and error rates claim that 30–40% of lung cancers were actually present on imaging at some point before they were diagnosed, and approximately 40% of breast cancers were present on imaging before they were diagnosed as well. These errors of omission lead to a huge amount of preventable morbidity and mortality for patients.

Our team moved forward with the assumption that the data found in these publications was accurate, but that we, as a society, aren’t aware of it. This was a huge leap of faith for us. We understood that there probably was not a single doctor that believed the findings, but we decided to build a system that would confirm the problem, and then solve it.

We have built a safety net to catch patients who might slip through the cracks of diagnosis and peer-review through AI technology and our AI Hub that empowers physicians without disrupting their workflow. Together with our health system and developer partners, Ferrum Health is building a future in which every patient can benefit from the best technologies in the world, no matter who or where they are.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

This mistake seems obvious in hindsight, but hindsight is always 20/20 right? Early on when building our AI technology, we had this err of self righteousness. Once we identified the errors reported in the studies, then built the platform to find them in everyday use, we couldn’t fathom how others couldn’t see what we saw.

This was a rough reality, because we were basically telling brilliant, caring, hard working doctors that they were basically committing malpractice regularly. Through our conversations with doctors, we realized we were using accusatory words or phrases in our discussions, such as “patients deaths” or “mistakes” that caused physicians to shut us down.

We knew they were doing the best they could but it’s a system that’s failing them. They care, we care, and we couldn’t go at them with this antagonistic language. We learned OUR mistakes, and rephrased our approach to those conversations to communicate what we knew: there’s more data, more patients getting sick and more complex scans that are all pieces of a broken system that were converging to cause this.

Once we communicated our vision accurately of the benefits of marrying artificial intelligence and radiology, we had countless doctors who believed in our approach and we got a much larger adoption rate after we changed our positioning.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

My sophomore year of college, I had a chance to work as a corporate finance intern at a company called Integra Lifesciences. Seeing the CEO of the company, Stuart Essig at work, I remember vividly the relationship he had with his leadership team. They respected each other, were able to disagree constructively, were strategic thinkers who could still execute flawlessly on the operationally complex details of projects, and still managed to all be friends. As a mentor, he set the bar for the culture and team I aspire to have.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

Healthcare is a complex system with countless lives at stake. It’s like a mechanical watch. There are many ways to disrupt it that will break it, and very few that will actually make it better. Most changes to complex systems will cause more damage than good, so we have to be particularly careful about the patient lives that will be affected. In healthcare, even seemingly obvious changes, like making providers financially responsible for patient outcomes, can have unintended negative consequences like forcing under-resourced rural hospitals and clinics to close.

Clearly negative disruptions, like Covid, can lead to positive changes, like accelerating the adoption of telemedicine. This leads to the dilemma where everyone agrees that healthcare needs to be disrupted, but nobody can agree on how that disruption needs to happen.

Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

The best three pieces of advice I got were:

1. Every business is made up of people, and people make every decision in a business. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start when we go after large accounts that we want to work with, but the first step is always the same. Find an ally and champion within an organization who believes in the future we are building, and make them successful.
2. One of the rarest resources in the business is trust. I’ve come to appreciate how differentiating it is to have a reputation of trust, and how many opportunities arise because of it. Whether it is an investor, customer or employee, change and progress always requires some level of risk and therefore trust.
3. Take care of your employees. There are plenty of rational reasons to do this, from cost of turnover to institutional knowledge, but at the end of the day, these are people who trust us with their livelihood and time, and who believe in our company’s mission more than anybody else.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

We are offering a bold change to how health systems ensure they are delivering the right care for their patients, from population screening through diagnosis and treatment. I would love to be able to establish deeper partnerships with health systems where, rather than selling AI applications one by one to different clinical leaders, we are able to collaborate at the system level to fundamentally revisit how patients flow through their system and drive deeper systemic change together. We’d love to really take ownership over patient populations and clear pathways for commonly mismanaged conditions like lung cancer, aortic aneurysms and osteoporosis.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

It’s an old book, but I continue to reread Positioning by Al Ries, which digs into why individuals remember brands and how successful companies have created and defended positions in crowded and noisy markets. Any business owner is going to need to think about how they stand out from their competition, and I think this book provides a great perspective on human psychology on the matter.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My favorite life lesson quote is the classic one by Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

This is the challenge when you are trying to build technology to match a vision for a better future, and it’s extremely relevant to advances being made in the current state of the world.

I don’t think of it as ignoring the needs of the customer, but rather it’s about improving how the world looks no matter how obvious it is to us, or frustrating it is to communicate a vision and build something that doesn’t exist today. This is a challenge that every innovator has experienced.

I believe the solution is to solidify goals and pave a clear path to the future that intelligently brings together AI and radiology. And if and when we experience resistance, it’s important to focus on big picture needs and solve for those pain points.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

There’s a lot of great things about our healthcare system and providers within, and there are also a lot of opportunities for improvement to support the physician’s themselves so they can be the greatest doctors. We need to improve the system in a way that eases the burden on doctors and their staff, and supports them in approaching each patient holistically.

We need a system that optimizes all of the moving pieces within healthcare and eliminates the clogs that have become the norm. If I could start a movement, it would be to bring people together to make smart, necessary improvements to the way patients flow through the healthcare system and drive deeper systemic change together. This could improve the lives of millions of people worldwide.

How can our readers follow you online?

Thank you! They can follow us on LinkedIn or our Ferrum Health blog page.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!