Revolutionizing Healthcare in the Digital Age: Charles Williams & Aadli Abdul-Kareem

“We are building a platform that needs to become a standard in healthcare.”

When it comes to healthcare, accessing and managing data that provides meaningful insight into the patient and community is paramount. Irrespective of the widespread availability of secure electronic systems, most Americans’ medical information is locked in medical record systems. There is huge gap and delay when it comes to being able to use that data to improve care, and allow for all stakeholders in the continuum of care to leverage a single vendor agnostic platform. Healthcare providers and health workers need a complete patient profile establishing a 360-degree view of the patient and community. Information needs to be actionable delivering insight into their lives guiding the decision making process. While these solutions cannot replace provider-patient communication, it can greatly improve the completeness of patient’s records when clinical, social, and financial data are aggregated to paint a profile. Health Information Exchange solutions allow doctors, nurses, pharmacists, other health care providers and patients to appropriately access and securely share patient data; however, it’s only part of what the industry needs to improve care and manage cost. Realizing the need of a holistic enterprise healthcare platform and the value that brings to healthcare, Charles Williams and Aadli Abdul-Kareem founded Electronic Health Network, Inc. (EHN)in 2007 with the sole aim of deploying a robust technology platform to enable payers, hospitals, clinics, labs, and public health agencies provide a “Single View” of the patient.

EHN enables access to clinical, social, financial data sources, data quality, data modeling, normalization, standardization, validation, care coordination and care transition. Our underlying technology is an open platform that allows communities to share information, cleanse the data, and use the information to drive decisions. They are also able to apply location intelligence and spatial analytics to create a visual business intelligence experience.

Before establishing EHN with Aadli, Charles served in the US Air Force after high school in 1982 and went to St. Leo College during his tenure. He has 25 years’ entrepreneurial experience, in which 17 years is in the payment industry, converting paper-based financial transactions to electronic.This includes Visa, MasterCard, Checks to ACH, and Food Stamps to EBT and Gift Checks to Gift Cards. He got the idea of EHN based on his experience in the payment industry. He earlier served as Small Business Advocate, and was the former chairman for SCORE in Charleston and served on the board of director for Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce and South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce.

Aadli Abdul-Kareem holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from The Citadel Military College of South Carolina and currently holds the position of Managing Partner. Aadli has worked with Prince George’s Health Department, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services funded innovations. His projects included advanced interoperability, consent driven transactions, data segmentation, data modeling, and launching health information exchange platforms. He enjoys running, working out, and collecting vinyl records. And above all, Aadli is an Interoperability expert.

“Our difference is how we leverage healthcare and industry standards to drive technology. We have the ability to allow healthcare organizations to share clinical data using their existing applications then we capture the data and make it available for master data management. We don’t believe in single vendor dependency, we say choose whatever applications work best for your business and we will integrate them. It doesn’t matter if their applications are compliant or non-compliant. Our adherence to standards allows our technology to fill in the gaps for vendors,” said Charles.

Problem with Data Access and Quality? EHN has a solution!
The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) have charged healthcare organizations to adopt electronic systems and securely share patient data. As a result, healthcare organizations have adopted varying electronic medical records (EMR) and other health information systems (HIS), such as Radiology Information Systems, Laboratory Information Management Systems, and Pharmacy Information System as few examples. The growing number of EMR/HIS adoptions has proven valuable, yet introduced a challenge of securely and efficiently sharing and using PHI at an affordable cost. Some challenges include:

• Sharing PHI while not adhering to regulations and maintaining ARRA/HIPAA compliance
• Navigating silos by engineering complex EMR/HIS Systems without having interoperability in mind
• Cleansing the data accessed from the various systems
• Modeling the data to deliver actionable insight
• Providing differing stakeholders access to differing parts of the data

Electronic Health Network has a solution that addresses the challenges many organizations face with attaining interoperability, data quality, and data modeling. It is an extremely robust health information exchange (HIE) platform, Master Data Management solution and more affordably connects doctors to hospitals, clinics, labs, radiologists, government and payers through any healthcare systems. Communities are able to achieve a “Single View” of the patient. They can overcome data barriers, connect hard-to-access information, and share it across the entire healthcare community. The data is accessible, accurate, and actionable, the single view of the patient adds value across the entire healthcare landscape.

The “Mint” Platform
Charles and Aadli positioned EHN as vendor agnostic leaders in advanced healthcare interoperability and master data management. Its applications are integrated into the platform and offers consent management, care coordination, care transition, health information exchange, and data quality services. The platform is based on open standards and is able to expose web services allowing organizations to integrate their existing applications onto the platform. It also allows developers to build healthcare specific applications and integrate them onto its platform.

EHN helps hospitals, clinics, labs, public health agencies, payers, and other healthcare organizations with all their data needs. The technology is agile, flexible, and scalable. The solution works on a distributed database model meaning we support both centralized and federated architecture. The platform also has a data federation module that is able to access and manage data in existing database eliminating the need to migrate the data to a central location. The vendor-neutral MiNT platform maintains patient identity, provider identity, facilitates document sharing, implements access controls, and communicates across health enterprises and communities. The architecture design consists of an IHE-based Health Information Exchange (HIE), Electronic Health Record (EHR) Integration Engine, and Master Data Management Solution (Health Data Hub) with multiple applications and data analytic tools. With MiNT, Electronic Health Network is changing the way healthcare connects by integrating healthcare stakeholders onto a platform that provides fast, efficient, easy to use, safe and secure access to health information in real-time.

Eclipse: Eclipse is a referral management care coordination application. It’s integrated into the platform and allows users to transition care while accessing clinical data from the solution. System users are also able to pull real-time reports based on conditions, cost, or any parameters the community requires. The application is also able to allow users to collect social data such as barriers to health, education, work status, and other social determinant data. Based on the information collected users are able to implement guided interventions based on the patient needs. The objective is to resolve non obvious issues outside of their health condition prohibiting them from improving their health. An example is not being able to make it to the doctor because the patient lacks appropriate transportation. Eclipse is highly customizable, user friendly, and works on mobile devices.

The Hurdle Run
The company is a small technology firm focused on innovation. Owing to their astute leadership of EHN, Charles and Aadli have solved some of the largest problems experienced in healthcare such as consent driven transactions, data segmentation, data quality, and interoperability. EHN’s competitors are very large companies and it’s difficult to compete with large corporations. The founders resolved this by partnering with Pitney Bowes and developed a Joint Solution for healthcare that will allow the company to compete with large corporations.

The Future Sight 
“We are focusing on our strengths as an Enterprise Platform providing a single view focusing on agility, modularity and scalability, that is Vendor Agnostic, protecting the privacy and security of the network, vendors, stakeholders and patients. We will continue to work with our partners and provide solutions to Managed Care Organizations, Accountable Care Organizations and Hospital Systems. We have an interoperable enterprise platform and very user friendly applications that answer critical questions dealing with access to data, data quality, and coordinating care,” explained Aadli.

The Happy Clients
It’s has been stated that the future of healthcare starts with EHN. Clients are highly pleased with the results that EHN is providing.

“The health department utilizes multiple applications and our patients need access to many services. EHN’s technology allowed us to integrate our applications improving our efficiency and access to data” – Dr. Ernest Carter M.D. PhD Deputy Health Officer Prince George’s County Health Department

“We are delighted to support EHN as they offer real solutions for the interoperability challenge in healthcare. EHN is bringing IT solutions to an industry that requires the highest technology standards and performance. It is an honor to recognize this company as part of South Carolina’s technology-based economy.” – Bill Mahoney CEO of SCRA Technology Ventures

“Our vision is to preserve and improve the quality of life of all individuals through secured access to health information that is fast, efficient, affordable, secured, and easy to use for providers, consumers and stakeholders.”