Charlie is an accomplished healthcare innovator with over 30 years of leadership experience driving operational excellence across the health-tech landscape. Prior to joining Stratus, he served as CEO of DCI Health Technology Inc. (a Foxconn company), where he delivered digital solutions to enhance patient safety and global health system efficiency. A graduate of Florida State University, Charlie is dedicated to transforming the care continuum through high-impact innovation and improved patient outcomes.

Evolving EEG for Modern Healthcare

EEG testing has historically been a cumbersome process, requiring a technologist, specialized equipment, and a reading neurologist to converge in the same place at the same time. What has changed dramatically is the shift toward a decentralized infrastructure, made possible by cloud-based technology and a distributed workforce.

At Stratus, we've built what I believe is the most scalable EEG delivery model in the country. We can send a technologist into a patient's home, run a hospital-quality study, and have that data reviewed remotely by a specialist within days. This model opens up access for patients in rural and underserved communities who might otherwise go without timely diagnostics. Our large staff of registered EEG technologists also supports hospitals and ICUs that don't have the internal resources to run a continuously monitored EEG program on their own.

Now, artificial intelligence is adding another layer of capability. We're integrating deep learning algorithms to help detect neurological biomarkers, flag anomalies faster, and streamline clinical workflows. In short, we're moving from a world where EEG was a bottleneck to one where it becomes a real-time clinical decision-making tool.

The Importance of Communication and Education

When I co-founded Watermark Medical, we were essentially asking primary care physicians to rethink how sleep apnea testing was done, moving it out of the sleep lab and into the patient's home. No one had done that at scale before. What I learned quickly was that the technology itself was never the hard part — the hard part was helping a busy physician understand why it mattered to their patients and their practice, without burying them in specs and clinical jargon.

That experience shaped how I think about communication to this day. Whether I'm talking to a hospital administrator, a neurologist, or a patient's family, I always start with the problem they're living with and then show how the technology solves it. At Stratus, that's still how we approach every conversation.

Education also needs to start further upstream, with primary care physicians. Neurologists and epileptologists understand EEG technology deeply because they have to. But the referring physician who sees a patient with unexplained spells, cognitive changes, or a post-stroke presentation doesn't always think “EEG” first — or assumes it's too logistically complicated to order for their patient. Part of our mission at Stratus is closing that gap: making it easy for non-neurologists to recognize when an EEG is appropriate, refer confidently to a specialist, and move through the ordering and fulfillment process without it feeling like a burden.

Future Trends and Career Advice

Looking ahead, a few trends stand out to me. AI and machine learning are chief among them — we have over 10 million hours of AVEEG data in our R&D database, and the biomarker detection work coming out of that research is genuinely exciting. I also expect the decentralization of diagnostics, including home-based testing, continuous in-hospital monitoring, and remote reading, to keep accelerating. And as wearable neurotech matures, EEG will become more continuous and longitudinal, fundamentally changing the diagnostic picture. We're moving from episodic snapshots of brain activity to ongoing brain health monitoring. The brain matters, and it should be monitored like the heart and lungs are.

For professionals pursuing a career in healthcare technology and medical innovation, my advice is twofold. First, get comfortable with ambiguity and get really good at listening. In this industry, you're constantly working at the intersection of clinical needs, regulatory requirements, technology capabilities, and business realities — and those forces don't always point in the same direction. The people who thrive are the ones who can sit in a room with a neurologist, a hospital CFO, and an engineering team, and genuinely hear what each of them needs.

Second, don't underestimate the operational side of healthcare. A brilliant technology that's hard to implement, hard to get reimbursed, or hard to scale will lose every time to a good technology that's easy to deploy. Some of the most impactful work I've done in my career wasn't inventing something new — it was figuring out how to deliver existing solutions more efficiently and more accessibly. That's where lives actually get changed.