Bill Oldham credits much of his success and rise in business to the lessons he learned from his parents, both educators, who instilled the value of education and hard work and provided a simple, idyllic background in Arkansas. He also recognizes the many mentors who helped shape his career by offering guidance, sharing entrepreneurial stories and providing living examples of titan behavior to make large, positive and long-lasting changes in various fields, including healthcare.
Oldham studied business, economics and entrepreneurial studies at Harding University and Manchester Business School. Throughout his education and the beginning of his career on Wall Street, he picked up priceless life lessons that fed his spirit to care for other people and find value in noble causes.
In 2013, Oldham co-founded AscellaHealth with CEO Dea Belazi, Pharm.D., M.P.H., who shared his vision for making meaningful changes in the healthcare system that directly help the lives of people worldwide with rare diseases and chronic conditions. He successfully tackled the most critical issues — access to quality care at affordable costs and the introduction of creative solutions to maximize resources, save money and improve health outcomes.
“My colleague Dea Belazi … and I both risked personal resources to invest and build a new, untested business model in pharmacy benefit management where data aggregation and streamlined communication tools for information exchange between patients, prescribers and pharmacies would result in better outcomes for patients with rare disease and/or complex, chronic conditions,” Oldham said. “As entrepreneurs, we positioned AscellaHealth as a single-source partner to pharmaceutical manufacturers and other industry stakeholders for the successful commercialization of specialty drugs, cell and gene therapies for the treatment of rare conditions.”
As chairman and chief financial officer of AscellaHealth, Oldham transitioned the organization to a specialty pharmacy solutions company, led global expansion and guided the business to financial success — a 1,556% four-year revenue increase through both organic growth and acquisitions.
“Oldham has also developed highly successful enterprises with solutions in fintech, health information technology and health services. He powered the development of Evolvent Technologies, growing the organization from 30 employees with $3 million in revenue in 2004 to more than 400 employees and $100 million in revenue in 2012 when it was acquired by ManTech. Evolvent improved the quality of care for American soldiers within the Department of Defense by building an electronic medical record system to manage crucial images and data. He also created an information management program for the Affordable Care Act to bring together vast amounts of Medicare and Medicaid data,” Oldham’s team said.
In addition to establishing various startups and holding several C-suite executive positions for federal health IT companies and IDEAglobal, Oldham founded and now leads the Thought Leadership and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit encouraging thought leadership to solve healthcare’s biggest ongoing challenges.