Murali Naidu, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Vitea, recently joined host Mike Duggan on Beyond the Bedside, a healthcare leadership podcast, for a wide-ranging conversation on his journey from the operating room to the executive suite — and why healthcare's AI era demands leaders who understand both.
Before joining Vitea, Dr. Naidu spent more than a decade as a practicing general surgeon before moving into hospital leadership, most recently serving as CEO of San Ramon Regional Medical Center. The transition, he explains in the episode, began with an observation from hospital meetings: clinical, finance, and operations teams were each "talking in their own lanes." He wanted to know what it would look like to bring those elements together: building operations and finance around great patient care, rather than the other way around.
From the OR to the boardroom
The hardest shift, Dr. Naidu says, was moving from a world of direct, hands-on problem-solving to one of influence, where results take far longer to see. What carried over was the motivation: taking care of people.
His advice for clinicians considering the same move is characteristically direct — you need a passion for making change, an appetite for solving problems, and comfort with uncertainty.
That uncertainty is considerable. Dr. Naidu points to workforce shortages compounded by post-pandemic mobility, and to financial pressure that leaves no room for trial and error; in California, he notes, 53% of hospitals operate in the red. "We must be willing to be uncomfortable," he says, "because we cannot keep doing things the same way."
Asked where AI can deliver the most value, Dr. Naidu doesn't reach for moonshots. The greatest opportunity, he argues, is reducing mundane work so clinicians can focus on why they entered the field — a nurse spending more time at the bedside, not the keyboard.
Looking five years out, he expects AI-driven clinical decision support to enable a consistency and quality of care that isn't possible today, potentially leveling the playing field for healthcare deserts.
But his optimism comes paired with a warning that speaks directly to Vitea's mission. His biggest concern about rapid AI adoption: "We don't fully know where this can be dangerous yet." Health systems, he argues, need to ensure AI tools stay within "lane lines" — and need to understand what's being done with their data.
The stakes are quantifiable. A medical record can fetch $500 to $1,000 on the black market, Dr. Naidu notes — compared to roughly $200 for banking information. IT security checks, he says, must evolve accordingly, and organizations must teach people how to use these tools effectively rather than assuming safe usage will happen on its own.
Leadership as accountability
Some of the episode's most striking moments come when Dr. Naidu connects his surgical past to his executive present. In surgery, an error of commission — cutting the wrong thing — is direct and visible. In leadership, he argues, deciding to staff a unit leanly is also an active decision with life-and-death consequences. The accountability is the same; only the visibility changes.
His grounding habits are simple: running, for the psychological benefit of processing the day, and perspective — most executive decisions, unlike a bleeding patient on the table, are not life-and-death at that exact instant. His advice to the next generation of healthcare leaders: figure out what you really want to do and solve problems you enjoy, because worthwhile things are often difficult.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube here.
Dr. Murali Naidu brings more than two decades of experience as a general surgeon and health system executive to Vitea, where he leads clinical strategy.
