How US healthcare startups should buy AI build partners.
Diligence questions on BAA fluency, eval discipline, and clinical workflow empathy — before you hire a studio to ship your AI product.
·8 min read
TL;DR
Buy an AI build partner on evidence: BAA-ready sequencing, eval gates, audit logging, clinical workflow humility, and a fixed delivery model with kill criteria. Dec reels and model-name dropping are not diligence. Brandlabs expects to be interviewed this hard — and interviews buyers the same way.
What diligence questions separate real healthcare AI builders from demo shops?
Ask how they sequence BAAs before PHI, what their eval dimensions are, how inference is audited, how they handle refusals and escalation, and who writes production code inside your Slack. Vague “we follow HIPAA best practices” without artifacts is a red flag.
Steal-this checklist:
- Show a sample data-flow diagram for an LLM feature touching PHI
- Show a safety eval fixture and how CI fails on it
- Name the last time they killed or delayed a demo for compliance
- Explain human-in-the-loop defaults for clinical users
- Clarify who is on-call for production incidents
- Describe handover — not just extension upsells
If answers are slides without systems, keep shopping.
How should pricing and timeline signals inform trust?
Be wary of “fully HIPAA-compliant AI in four weeks” and of open-ended time-and-materials with no eval gates. Prefer time-boxed discovery, explicit phase gates, and scope tied to measurable behaviors — not story points alone.
Healthy patterns:
- Paid discovery with go/no-go
- 12–20 week zero-to-one with phase exits
- Eval thresholds in the SOW language
- Clear assumptions about data access dates
Unhealthy patterns:
- Compliance as a week-16 checkbox
- Success = “chatbot live”
- Offshore black-box teams with no FDE accountability
Price matters. Regret costs more.
What should you demand in the first thirty days?
A living architecture, vendor/BAA matrix, seed eval suite, risk register, and a Friday evidence cadence. If thirty days only produced a Figma file and a LangChain hello-world, you bought theater.
Brandlabs Foundation phase exists to force those artifacts early. Whether you hire us or someone else, insist on the same evidence.
Your clinical, compliance, and engineering stakeholders should all be able to point to the same scorecard.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need a partner who is itself a covered entity?
Usually you need a partner who can operate as a business associate when they touch PHI, with contracts and technical posture to match. Ask counsel how your specific arrangement should be structured.
Should we hire in-house instead?
If you already know the product shape and can hire seniors who have shipped regulated AI, maybe. If you are still in the dangerous middle — thesis to first production users — an embedded pod can compress risk.