About Essentrify
Building the national standard for opioid settlement compliance through forensic-grade data architecture and evidence-based community resilience.
To secure the 18-year integrity of opioid remediation through the Abatement Information Ecosystem.
We bridge the gap between complex federal privacy mandates and the forensic requirements of state audits, ensuring that every municipality can prove the impact of its investment. Every dollar accounted for. Every outcome verified.
Our Core Pillars
Fiduciary Stewardship
We specialize in protecting recipients of historic settlement funds — including the Purdue Pharma/Sackler distributions — from audit risk and claw-backs. Our systems are engineered to protect your 15% administrative cap while providing forensic data integrity for every remediation dollar spent.
Clinical and Privacy Rigor
Our team solves the “data deadlock” at the intersection of HIPAA and 42 CFR Part 2. We ensure data flows seamlessly from institutional systems like Epic and Oracle Health into an audit-ready municipal dashboard without compromising patient confidentiality.
Knowledge Translation
We don’t just collect data; we build evidence. Through the Evidence Lab and the Community Hub, we help our members translate local project results into evidence-based practices that can be shared across professional organizations.
How We Got Here
The academic work came first. George and Daniel Adepoju and Daniel Cheruiyot, then graduate students in health informatics at Indiana University Indianapolis, published a research paper examining the role of health information technology for community health service providers — the peer support programs, harm reduction organizations, sober living operators, and reentry services that deliver the most immediate recovery work but have never been integrated into the clinical data infrastructure that governs how healthcare is funded and evaluated.
When they graduated in May 2025, they brought that research to Doug Dormer. Not as a consulting engagement. As a founding conversation. They had identified a structural problem of extraordinary scale. Doug had spent his career at the intersection of health informatics, community behavioral health platforms, and the business models that determine whether good programs survive. They saw the opioid settlement as the once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve the problem permanently. Together, they began designing what would become Essentrify.
Brian Williams made the problem concrete. As the Executive Director of a community health organization serving twenty counties in rural Missouri, Brian had watched his organization deliver genuinely effective peer support, harm reduction, and reentry services for years — and watched those services remain invisible to the evidentiary frameworks that govern payer decisions.
Community health organizations like Brian’s operate on the functional fringe of the health system. Not because the work is marginal — it is often the most consequential intervention in a person’s recovery — but because the data infrastructure connecting community services to clinical outcomes has never existed. As a result, these organizations are structurally excluded from the evidence-based practice discussion that governs sustainable funding. They cannot access Medicaid reimbursement, cannot qualify for value-based care contracts, and cannot demonstrate the clinical outcomes that would make their programs financially durable. The people doing the most important recovery work in the country are perpetually one funding decision away from closure — not because their programs do not work, but because the health system has no mechanism to see that they do.
That structural exclusion is the problem Essentrify was built to solve. And the opioid settlement is the opportunity to solve it permanently. Eighteen years of dedicated funding, flowing directly to the communities where the crisis is worst, creates the window to build the longitudinal evidence base that does not yet exist. If that evidence is generated rigorously — connecting community interventions to clinical outcomes over time — it does not just justify settlement spending. It creates the foundation for sustainable reimbursement that outlasts the settlement itself. Not just for addiction services, but for community and behavioral health services broadly.
The settlement is the bridge. The evidence is what makes the other side reachable.
The People Behind Essentrify
Six people came to the same problem from different directions and recognized that solving it required all of them.
Douglas Dormer, CPA (inactive)
Chief Executive Officer & Co-FounderDoug Dormer founded Essentrify because earlier he built addiction recovery technology that worked but was unable to assemble a sufficient evidence base that would cause conventional payers to pay for it. Doug has spent nearly a decade looking for the mechanism to solve that. The opioid settlements are that mechanism.
Douglas Dormer is a health information technology entrepreneur, researcher, and educator whose career spans financial accountability, clinical informatics, and addiction recovery technology. A graduate of the University of Michigan and a former Certified Public Accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, he co-authored an early practitioner text on hospital cost management before building a career at the intersection of enterprise health IT and public health.
From 2012 to 2017, Doug founded and led a company focused on patient engagement technology for addiction treatment and criminal justice re-entry. Clients deployed his platform with support from grants funded in part by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Department of Justice, and the Department of Labor. That work produced measurable reductions in relapse and recidivism rates. It could not, however, generate a sufficient evidence base to sustain reimbursement through conventional payers — not because the interventions did not work, but because the data infrastructure to prove they worked did not exist. When federal funding for behavioral approaches to addiction contracted sharply in 2017, the company did not survive the shift.
That experience — building something that worked, watching it fail to achieve sustainable funding for structural rather than clinical reasons, and spending the years since looking for the mechanism to fix that — is the origin story of Essentrify. The National Opioid Settlements are that mechanism: $57 billion, distributed by court order rather than congressional appropriation, with built-in compliance requirements that create both the obligation and the opportunity to build the evidence infrastructure that community-based addiction programs have never had.
Doug has served in various roles including guest lecturer, Capstone mentor, and adjunct instructor in the Master’s program in Health Informatics at Indiana University Indianapolis for more than sixteen years, where he mentored the physician-informaticists who now lead Essentrify’s clinical, regulatory, and technical functions. He also held senior commercial leadership roles at Bottomline Technologies (NASDAQ: EPAY), helping take the firm from early revenue to more than $100 million and a successful IPO.
Daniel Cheruiyot, MD, MBA, MSc
Director of the Evidence LabDr. Cheruiyot leads Essentrify’s research mission — designing the evidence frameworks that allow community-based addiction programs to generate the longitudinal, participant-level data they have never had.
Daniel Cheruiyot is a physician, healthcare executive, and health informaticist whose career spans clinical practice, health system leadership, and applied research. After earning his medical degree from the University of Nairobi, he founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Shepherds Hospitals in Kenya — a multi-site regional hospital network he built from a single facility into a four-location health system over a decade, with full responsibility for clinical quality, financial management, and electronic health record implementation.
He subsequently earned an MBA in Healthcare Management from Strathmore University and a Master of Science in Health Informatics from Indiana University Indianapolis, where he was mentored by Essentrify’s CEO. At Essentrify, Dr. Cheruiyot designed the intervention taxonomy and outcome measurement frameworks that form the foundation of the Abatement Information Ecosystem’s evidence architecture — one of the first systematic attempts to create a standard classification framework for community-based addiction interventions.
He is a published researcher in community health informatics, substance use prevention, and AI-driven behavioral health analytics, with work appearing in peer-reviewed journals and in collaboration with the Global Burden of Disease Study. He also serves as the architect of Essentrify’s website, reflecting the same initiative and range that characterize his broader contributions to the company.
George Adepoju, MD, MSc
Director of Public Sector InformaticsDr. Adepoju is Essentrify’s primary interface with the governmental, regulatory, and standards ecosystem — ensuring the platform’s compliance posture reflects current, authoritative understanding of the requirements its clients must meet.
George Adepoju is a physician and health informaticist specializing in the translation of public health policy into operational data infrastructure. He earned his medical degree from V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine, practiced obstetric and maternal medicine in Nigeria, and completed his Master of Science in Health Informatics at Indiana University Indianapolis.
His Capstone research — conducted at the Randolph County Caring Community Partnership in Missouri — produced a DHIS2-based community health surveillance system integrating validated clinical screening instruments for substance abuse and suicide risk, with a predictive machine learning model achieving 93 percent accuracy. That work became a foundational reference point for Essentrify’s community data infrastructure design.
At Essentrify, Dr. Adepoju monitors the evolution of the federal regulatory landscape governing opioid settlement accountability, substance use disorder data privacy, and health data interoperability standards, translating those requirements into platform design and client guidance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health, a member of Sigma Xi — The Scientific Research Honor Society, a collaborator on the Global Burden of Disease Study, and a published researcher in community health informatics, behavioral health analytics, and public health data governance. He is a recipient of the Jim Miller Student Scholarship Award from the Indiana Rural Health Association.
Daniel Adepoju, MD, MSc
Director of Product ArchitectureDr. Adepoju ensures that what Essentrify promises its clients — audit-ready compliance, privacy-compliant data handling, seamless interoperability — is what the platform actually delivers, and that it continues to deliver as regulations evolve.
Daniel Adepoju is a physician and health informaticist whose work sits at the intersection of clinical rigor, regulatory compliance, and platform design. He earned his medical degree from V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine and completed his Master of Science in Health Informatics at Indiana University Indianapolis, where he was mentored by Essentrify’s CEO.
Prior to his informatics studies, he served as a Clinical Research Coordinator on the World Health Organization’s ACTION III Trial at the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital Complex in Nigeria — experience that gave him direct exposure to the data quality standards, audit trail discipline, and protocol integrity that distinguish research-grade evidence generation from routine data collection.
At Essentrify, Dr. Adepoju serves as the permanent interface between the platform’s clinical, regulatory, and research requirements and the technical team responsible for building and maintaining it. He maps and resolves the complex, often conflicting demands of HIPAA, 42 CFR Part 2, Exhibit E accountability provisions, and HL7 FHIR interoperability standards into coherent specifications — then works with quality assurance to verify that what is built faithfully meets them, and continuously updates both as the regulatory environment evolves. He is a published researcher in community health informatics, ethical AI governance, and public health data infrastructure, with work appearing in peer-reviewed journals and in collaboration with the Global Burden of Disease Study. He is a recipient of the Jim Miller Student Scholarship Award from the Indiana Rural Health Association.
Brian Williams
Manager of the Community HubBrian Williams is a cornerstone of Missouri’s community health landscape. Since 2007, he has served as the Executive Director of the Randolph County Caring Community Partnership. Brian facilitates the human network of the Essentrify ecosystem, leveraging his roles on the board for the Network for Strong Communities and as Chair for the Northeast Alliance Advisory Coalition for the Office of Minority Health. He bridges the gap between government agencies, faith-based organizations, and health systems to ensure that abatement data reflects real-world community impact.
Lorna Miles, MBA, CHW
Director of OperationsLorna Miles is a seasoned healthcare executive with over 20 years of experience managing federal public health initiatives, including the HRSA Rural Communities Opioid Response Programs (RCORP). A former Governmental Paralegal to the Missouri Attorney General, Lorna ensures that Essentrify’s operational workflows meet the highest standards of transparency and accountability required for opioid abatement in Missouri.