stanford-medicine
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Michael Gardner Is Building a Second Operating System
After two decades inside academic medicine, the Stanford professor and MyBackHub CEO is applying a surgeon’s discipline to a founder’s problem: turning expertise into a system that can travel.
Eric Fain
Eric S. Fain, M.D. is the President and CEO of Procyrion, the Houston medical device company building Aortix, a percutaneous micropump roughly the size of a AA battery that is threaded into the aorta to boost blood flow and unload failing hearts. A Stanford-trained physician who never practiced clinically, Fain spent a decade at defibrillator pioneer Ventritex, then two decades climbing to Group President of St. Jude Medical and SVP at Abbott, before returning to startup life in 2018. He closed a $57.7M Series E in 2024 and serves as Lead Independent Director of Orchestra BioMed.
Justin Norden
Justin Norden is the co-founder and CEO of Qualified Health, an enterprise AI platform helping U.S. health systems deploy generative AI safely, with governance, monitoring, and clinical safeguards built in. A Stanford-trained physician with an MBA, an MPhil in computational biology from Cambridge, and a computer science degree from Carleton, he previously was a partner at GSR Ventures investing in healthcare AI, founded Trustworthy AI (acquired by Waymo), worked on Apple's healthcare team, and teaches AI in medicine at Stanford. In March 2026 Qualified Health raised a $125M Series B led by NEA, bringing total funding to $155M while serving 500,000+ users across systems representing roughly 7% of U.S. hospital revenue.