Why Brellium’s strategic advisor Dr. Ainsley MacLean only works with companies that are ‘obsessed’ with being the best

Dr. Ainsley MacLean, MD, FACR has built her career pushing boundaries in healthcare.

The Brigham and Women's Hospital-trained neuro-radiologist spent nearly 14 years at Kaiser Permanente (KP), where she served as the organization's first Chief AI Officer for the Mid-Atlantic region. At KP, she co-led the largest generative AI ambient scribe deployment in healthcare history and drove the rollout of AI-enhanced clinical decision support tools at scale.

Today, she serves as founding general partner of both Ainsley Capital and Ainsley Advisory Group, where she invests in care transformation solutions and advises on healthcare technology companies’ go-to-market strategies.

Last month, Dr. MacLean added strategic advisor to Brellium to her list of titles, joining the team to help advise Brellium’s expansion of payer products.

We sat down with Dr. MacLean to discuss her perspective on healthcare technology, what drew her to advising Brellium, and what she thinks separates companies driving innovation from those that will ultimately fall behind.

BRELLIUM: You spent a significant part of your career at Kaiser Permanente — an organization that operates quite differently from most of American healthcare. What drew you to that model?

AINSLEY: I really wanted to join an organization that was focused on putting the patient/member at the center of care and doing everything it could to remove barriers that block providers from practicing at the top of their license.

One of the things I found unique at KP is the ability to deploy technology in a way that's separated from traditional requirements around incentives or reimbursements. When you're in a ‘pay-vider model,’ you can free yourself from that when making technology investments. That was incredibly appealing to me.

I was always in operations — overseeing large teams in the radiology and imaging space — but I quickly became involved in national strategy around enterprise imaging, large equipment procurement, and eventually generative AI.

The common thread for me has always been: how do I impact change at a very large scale? Technology is what allows you to do that.

One of your signature projects was co-leading the largest AI scribe deployment to date in healthcare. What did you learn from that project?

The biggest thing I learned was that technology really has to sell itself through its usability. That requires physicians and other providers to feel like there's a huge value-add — because we've seen, over time, so many tech systems that are unfortunately perceived as barriers to care. Think about the advent of large electronic health records: tremendous standardization, but enormous busy work for providers.

You don't become a beloved product just by being a good product. It requires companies to connect with physicians, understand their problems, and then design something that's truly usable. What we did was get fast and furious feedback from teams and deploy that quickly at scale. And when I say quickly — the speed wasn't in the preparation. The preparation was thoughtful and careful. The speed was in the rollout once we were certain we’d done that work right.

That experience validated something I now look for in every company I advise: an almost obsessive focus on being the best at what you do, and putting that obsession above rapid growth. I truly believe rapid growth follows that obsession — not the other way around.

What does the healthcare technology landscape look like to you right now — what are you most excited about?

The energy is unlike anything I've seen in my career.

Incredibly smart people are leaning into healthcare because of what's become possible. But energy alone isn't enough — what I'm actually seeing in 2026 is a landscape with fewer companies doing better work, companies with a deeper hold on the market and more seasoned approaches. I like that, because what we keep hearing from health executives is that there's too much noise in health tech and they don't know who to trust. So fewer, quality providers is going to help that fatigue.

Concurrently, there's movement in the regulatory environment toward an innovative landscape that invests in technology to expand access to care. The Rural Health Transformation Program is notable, as is the focus on eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse. Both are important.

The companies that are helping address those problems — fragmented care, fraud and waste, the move toward value-based care — those are the companies that will be on top when we look a few years out.

There's a concern in the industry that AI will supercharge the adversarial relationship between payers and providers — an arms race that makes things worse for everyone. Do you see it differently?

I think about this a lot, actually. One of the things I always remind people of — and this is true in radiology as well — is that humans make mistakes. At the end of the day, what I see as the real opportunity for a company like Brellium is ensuring extremely high-quality performance for both provider groups and payer (including government) customers. Those are two very different customer profiles, and I think deep appreciation of that difference is one of the things that sets companies apart.

But ultimately, getting back to why I joined KP — both groups always have to be doing what's fundamentally best for the patient. Technology like Brellium can provide the ability to do just that. If both sides are working toward elevating provider quality, improving approval quality, and — critically — speeding all of this up, there's one person who really benefits: the patient. If costs can be reduced in the process, you create a win-win.

At KP we always talked about the value equation: increasing quality and reducing cost increases value, combined with really good service. That's become a litmus test for me of what a product should do.

What drew you specifically to advising Brellium?

I'm a mission-driven person. And I really believe in Brellium's mission fundamentally. I've seen firsthand the time and burden that compliance places on physician practices, and I’ve heard from families about the challenges they face when ABA authorizations are held over paperwork problems. On the payer side, the need to demonstrate through audits that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing is massive.

The technology is almost like table stakes for the companies I'm working with. Yes, I need to know the product is deep and unique and provides value. But at that point, it really comes down to the teams. Their ability to listen to feedback, to understand that you can't know everything, that it takes a village to deploy at scale.

What really gets me excited is when companies have managed to create something they can talk about and that consumers want to tell other people about — there's just something magical about certain companies. We all know these companies from the tech we use in our day-to-day lives. Why is it that certain apps just take off? A lot of times it's that you're making life better for people in a way that's easy to understand and easy to use.

I'm genuinely impressed by the way Brellium presents its work. Brellium’s messaging is consumable and useful for the organizations it serves. That's not a small thing — from a design standpoint, it signals a deep understanding of the end user.

Last question: if you were talking to a potential Brellium customer, what's the first question they should ask themselves?

What's the problem I'm actually trying to solve right now? For a lot of organizations, that comes down to waste and quality within their own system. So the question I'd push them to answer is: how are you measuring the savings? Technology should pay for itself, and then some.

Think about what your team currently spends time on — manual audit work, for instance. If you could have that running in the background and surfacing what needs attention, what could your team be doing instead? When I was a radiologist reading a study, if I had technology telling me there was a 99% likelihood a case was normal, it took an enormous burden off. I could make that diagnosis in ten seconds — but I was spending an extra ten being worried I'd missed something. The ability to provide that additional confidence, and then redirect your team's energy, is powerful.

We all know that in healthcare, the implications of a mistake are outsized compared to almost any other industry. The small investment you make in technology that helps prevent those mistakes can pay off in spades.