Sutter Health taps Ferrum Health for AI-based 'safety net' for lung cancer scans

Northern California healthcare system Sutter Health announced today that has begun a pilot with startup Ferrum Health, to use AI to monitor the work of radiologists and catch preventable medical errors in patients with lung cancer. Ferrum is a new startup founded by Pelu Tran, who previously founded and led Google Glass company Augmedix. It’s an AI company, but rather than building its business model on selling particular algorithms, it’s focused on deploying existing algorithms in a new way: as a background-monitoring “safety net” that only requires active attention from radiologists when it detects a discrepancy with their diagnoses. Coming out of my previous company and the strength that we had working with healthcare systems like Sutter we really realized that AI could be used in a few different ways, but that physicians, given all the pressures that they were under, were going to really struggle to carve out time in their workflow, in their day-to-day, to deploy solutions that are really focused on improving quality," said Tran.