Charles T. Folsom Jr. brings over 35 years of healthcare experience to the conversation about improving healthcare access through technology. As a registered nurse at Emory Healthcare’s emergency department and the Founder & CEO of eLife Technologies, Folsom combines clinical expertise with technological innovation to address critical health disparities.
With advanced degrees in nursing and healthcare management, along with certifications in project management and change management, he’s uniquely positioned to discuss both the medical realities and technological solutions for improved healthcare outcomes.
What do you do professionally?
I am a registered nurse. I work with Emory Healthcare in the emergency department, and also owner and founder of Elife technology, which is a new app development for 1st responders.
Tell us about your application
The application is designed for first responders. It’s a mobile application that’s on apple and android devices, and we also attach it to wearables like you can see on my wristband here, and it allows first responders to be able to tap and get information on you within four seconds, which helps with the pre-hospital treatment for patients as well as changing the clinical outcomes. We’re one of the first companies in the country to do it.
Can you share your journey from nursing to owning a healthcare AI product?
I’ve been a nurse for 37 years. My journey was long. I had to pay for my own education, so I was working as I went through school, but I did my undergraduate at Jacksonville University, and then I went on to Georgetown to do a Master’s degree in managing health systems. And from that point I kind of went into the corporate world and worked pretty extensively.
How has your nursing experience influenced your move into healthcare IT?
When you actually work operationally in healthcare, you see so many things that are nuanced that people don’t really understand it. Going behind the scenes and the complexity of disease and the complexity of practicing as a clinician. It can be quite daunting on people, and when we see outcomes of patients that we know could have been changed by having information available.
That was the biggest prompt for me to go in and say, Hey, we’ve got to fix this problem, because I can’t tell you how many times that mama or your auntie shows up in the emergency department with a bag full of medications, and they may be having a stroke, and they think that we can just magically fix it. But you’ve got to realize if you’re treating a complaint without context it can be very dangerous, because the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States is medical errors.
How has your perspective as an African American in healthcare influenced your entrepreneurship?
Health disparities exist. I can’t tell you how many times there’s a sickle cell patient come in. And the doctor, who doesn’t understand culturally that you know this is a real disease that’s affecting real people’s lives will order title
when we know that their bodies have to have opioids in order to manage the disease process. And now they even have genetic markers that show that certain individuals, especially of African American descent have the ability to process opioids at a faster rate than other people, which means their body’s ability to maintain pain free is less than other people who are non-african.
So the data really shows that there are big gigantic disparities in healthcare as far as the way patients are treated and the actual the differential diagnosis is being concrete and accurate. Because we see a lot of that happens that they’re young. They can get over the flu, they can get over a cold. Let them go home and shake it off, and then the patient comes back with pneumonia and end up in the ICU. Those things exist. This is not our imaginations.
What skills from your healthcare background helped you most as an entrepreneur?
Exposure and understanding process and integration. Those are the biggest things people overcomplicate things. Everything that we do in life has some process, tasks, steps, and things that we do, and looking at being able to determine the outcome, and regressively look back and say, Hey, how can I change this strategy. To create the outcome I want, is a vital skill that you must have in being an entrepreneur. Adaptation is the key. If you can’t adapt, you don’t even get started in it.
You’ve got to be able to look and see what the market desires. What’s the intended use of your product, delivering to the client? And is it something that they can digest? Or is it something that’s going to take a lot of effort for you to get them to be able to see the benefit of it.
That’s what we’ve done with our product and iterations to make to change it, to be more user friendly on the front end for end users, and to make them understand the benefit of using it when they take that information to the hospital, and being able to show their stuff on their phone or have it be on a device that they can use that information in seconds, changes the perspective of the caregiver, when the patient enters the facility.
What challenges have you faced in nursing and business?
Nursing challenges, the biggest thing is assumed perspective of who you are, a lot of times you won’t be deemed as intelligent as other people, or we have to second guess his work and keep in mind. I’ve worked everywhere from the emergency department at Grady. I worked in the intensive care unit at the Veterans Administration. I’ve recovered open heart patients.
So I’ve gone through a gamut of the most intense clinical settings that you can practice in, and having to overcome or go into a room, and the patient asks you, where did you go to school? As if the school you went to wasn’t legitimate. That can be. It’s not really frustrating, because you realize people just operate a lot of times in their level of ignorance, but having to prove yourself over and over again, shows the resilience that we have as African Americans. But it can be frustrating a lot of times.
In the entrepreneurial world, the biggest challenges we face as African Americans is collaboration. Our product is self-funded. So we have zero debt. We’ve got revenue, we’ve got subscriptions. Collaborating has been the biggest issue because we do not believe we have the ability to deliver a quality product to each other, based on assumptions about each other.
And that’s one of the biggest hurdles we have to overcome. Like we’re working now with Fort Valley State University, because MIT has a program that helps them do app development. So we’re having them work on our AI component of our application.
We have to give each other the opportunity to shine because we’ve proven that we run the busiest airport in the world. We’ve proven that we’ve led the way for multimillion dollar, multi-billion dollar companies to exist with innovation, that a lot in many cases is our innovations. But we don’t trust each other to deliver that quality product to each other.
What excites you about the current healthcare landscape and the future of patient care?
The ability to customize care is going to be so vast that I would predict in five years people will have the ability to live to be a hundred. Because now we’re using AI to actually do gene matching for transplant patients. That’s a game changer.
So, no longer are you guessing about whether the metrics go together. You’ve got the ability to do models for probability of rejection, compatibilities, the DNA. It’s just. It’s incredible what the future offers in through technology is just mind blowing right now.
What advice would you give to African Americans who want to heal the community through healthcare entrepreneurship?
Connect with all of your leaders in your community, even if they don’t collaborate with you. Continue to press those relationships, build those relationships. And the thing that we’ve seen is that initially there was a lot of resistance or people are skeptical. But now that they see that we’re delivering a real product that has real results, and patients are begging for it. Now we’re getting the traction that we need, and for us this is more than a business.
It’s a ministry, because at the end of the day I’m the one I’m experiencing, seeing people die over things that they could have easily changed diet modifications, exercising understanding disease processes, which is one of the big things that I do in coaching and coaching individual patients. But they got to understand that, it’s a saying that I have. It’s called: Man will be forced into health compliance through the manifestation of disease.
So at some point you’re going to have to adhere to the changes you need to make to survive, or the disease will overwhelm you.
Where can people find information about your product?
The name of the product is Elife health Summary. We’re on Instagram. We’re on Linkedin, and you can go to the website: https://www.elifesummary.com/. It has everything on there. It’s got videos. It’s got testimonials from individuals and patients as well as providers.
We’re trying to put the power in the patient’s hands to be able to make informed decisions. And that’s the biggest challenge that patients think that their doctor has all of their information, and I’m like, Honey, your doctor is in Aruba, and it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, and you might be having a stroke or a transit ischemic attack or a heart attack. And we need that information now. We need it from pre-hospital as well as hospital. So just going forward, we’re excited about what the future holds, and working with communities of color.
