Guiding Healthcare Towards Sustainability
Bill Oldham Selected as “One of 20 Most Influential Healthcare Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2021”
Read here: https://thehealthcareinsights.com/bill-oldham-guiding-healthcare-towards-sustainability/
Founder and President of Thought Leadership and Innovation Foundation, Bill Oldham, thinks about the complexity of healthcare challenges, driven by:
A commitment to bringing about visceral changes that transform the industry into a more cost-effective, patient-centric model of care that yields positive results for different patient populations.
A passion for improving people’s lives – a precept that has guided his entrepreneurial career and contributed to the development of companies and not-for-profit organizations that can successfully tackle some of the most critical, troublesome issues facing our entire healthcare system.
A highly successful career that spans multiple business journeys and entrepreneurial healthcare ventures that has touched the lives of military personnel, public employees and private citizens, with meaningful contributions to virtually every segment of healthcare in our society and economy.
A keen sensitivity to the dilemmas facing underserved communities and “forgotten populations” -- a hallmark of his service.
Catalyst for Change
Readers will understand what motivates Bill to pursue targeted, consistent and focused efforts that are applied in a steady fashion. These initiatives weave in a fabric of experience that reflect his position as a successful entrepreneur, investor and consultant to multiple healthcare businesses. Bill’s career spans more than four-decade track record of enhancing the health and quality of life for millions of people.
Discover the most remarkable activities he has undertaken leading the ‘Thought Leadership and Innovation Foundation’ (www.thoughtfoundation.org; TLI), a non-profit organization that he founded to work at the nexus of science, technology and public health. TLI innovates for superior prevention, treatment, and outcomes for those facing life-altering medical diagnoses. The organization focuses on systemic, complex healthcare challenges that alter the lives of patients in varied demographics and communities across the country and around the world.
“I chose healthcare as my focus because there were tremendous opportunities for an entrepreneur but as an entrepreneur with a conscience. Let’s do something to really make a difference, save lots of money and help patients live much better.”
A Personal Formula to Make Healthcare Sustainable
Building on the value of family, education and an appreciation of many mentors, Bill convened a group of strategic thinkers and experienced professionals from private and public healthcare sectors in striving for a more sustainable healthcare industry. A decade later, the Thought Leadership and Innovation Foundation is focused on areas of interest that impact chronic disease, behavioral health, care design and multiple aspects of healthcare delivery.
For more than a decade, TLI has worked with federal and commercial organizations, as well as global partners, to implement strategies that help patient populations struggling to find better healthcare outcomes not only in the U.S. but worldwide.
“First, you’ve got to work with people and meet them where they are and help them through the challenge. It’s all about people. Second is persistence in the face of all this resistance. Persistence is key.”
He founded TLI with the intent to look into diverse areas, including infusion therapies, inter-osseous devices, better data, advanced technology and regenerative medicine, just to mention a few. In one area, the issue of chronic infection, TLI has been helping to advance the state of science so that it is more productive in supporting providers, patients and payers.
A prime example of the work at TLI is to better support people suffering from limb loss. They began working with the National Institutes of Health and Mayo Clinic to create a National Limb Loss & Prevention Registry, addressing the challenges facing patients who have suffered catastrophic limb loss as well as how are they treated and what works or what does not work for each person.
Lessons Learned Along the Journey
Personally, one of the surprising and painful catalysts to help make healthcare better came from his own family.
About a decade ago, two of his younger sons were unfortunately diagnosed with severe autism. The boys’ conditions and frightening prognosis led Bill and his wife to seek help and solutions. But after a long struggle, their efforts were fruitless. Their sons required continuous care with many interventions, challenges that required the access to data for better outcomes, which was not forthcoming at their healthcare systems.
This pain provided the burning motivation to improve healthcare by realizing the potential of data, harnessing the ability to analyze large quantities of data and distill meaningful answers. To showcase the bright potential of health data, he wrote a book called ‘Transforming Health Care: Better Data for Better Care’ to illustrate that the US healthcare could be dramatically improved through technology.
“As an entrepreneur, what excites me is all the different great ideas that continue to emerge, whether it’s just a product or it becomes a full-fledged business. So yes — stay tuned. Lots of interesting things are about to happen.”
Overarching Goal: Create a Better World
Throughout his entrepreneurial journey, he has impacted a variety of fields -- finance, IT, cybersecurity, philanthropy and community services. He’s a well-published author, speaker and frequently donates to marginalized communities. This has taught him a lot of valuable lessons and broadened his understanding that healthcare organizations are varied, slow to incorporate technology and resistant to change.
But the vision to make healthcare better is still far from realized.
“One of the things moving forward that I’m most excited about is our ‘TLI Innovation Hub’. This takes ideas out of non-profit projects, partnerships with universities or commercial companies and helps to build new solutions.”