Industry Expert

Abdul-Malik Shakir is a recognized industry expert in healthcare information management. His information technology experience spans more than four decades, including 40+ years in healthcare. His professional experience includes development of enterprise information architectures, data warehouses/business intelligence applications, systems integration solutions, and expertise in electronic data interchange standards. Mr. Shakir’s consulting experience includes providing advisory services and expert assistance to large-scale healthcare provider organizations and integrated delivery networks. He also served as senior advisor to the CDC and several State health departments on the information component of their National Electronic Disease Surveillance System and Public Health Information Network initiatives.

Mr. Shakir has contributed to the advancement of healthcare-related standards through volunteer participation in Health Level Seven (HL7), X12N Healthcare Task Group, OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force, the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), and the IEEE Joint Workgroup for a Common Data Model. He is currently co-chair of the HL7 Modeling and Methodology workgroup, and an active member of the HL7 Architectural Review Board, Education, and Public Health and Emergency Response workgroups. He has served on the HL7 Board of Directors for three terms (a total of six years) and has served as co-chair of the HL7 Modeling and Methodology workgroup since 1994. He is the author of numerous articles on information modeling and their role in healthcare informatics standards. He has provided lectures on the topic of information management and data modeling in academic settings as well as at industry trade shows.

Mr. Shakir is President and Chief Informatics Scientist for Healthcare Information Integration Infrastructure Solutions (Hi3 Solutions), a privately owned, Health Information Technology vendor, headquartered in Burbank, California. Hi3 Solutions, along with its affiliates, assists public health, healthcare, and health research organizations attempting to utilize informatics standards to overcome barriers to interoperability. The mission of Hi3 Solutions is to assist healthcare organizations with leveraging their information assets to discover and prosper from evidence-based best practices in healthcare through proven information management methods, standards, and techniques. Hi3 Solutions was founded as “Shakir Consulting,” a sole proprietorship, in November 2001 and incorporated as “Healthcare Information Integration Infrastructure Solutions, Inc.”, a private partnership, in 2014. It has successfully served the needs of numerous public and private healthcare, public health, and health research related enterprises and information system solutions vendors.

Project Examples

Public Health Disease Surveillance & Architecture

  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — Developed the Public Health Conceptual Data Model (PHCDM), Public Health Domain Information Model (PHDIM), and engineered logical data structures to support Bioterrorism Response Management and the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS).

  • Utah Department of Health — Conducted critical compliance assessments comparing state Integrated Data Repositories against foundational national models (NEDSS/PHCDM).

  • Information Technology International — Assessed National Electronic Disease Surveillance System alignments and designed database layers for Electronic Laboratory Reporting Systems.

  • Los Angeles County Department of Health Services — Designed and deployed architectural infrastructure, Operational Databases, and terminology services for the county’s Bioterrorism Response Management System and Public Health Information Management System (PHIMS).

  • Association of Public Health Laboratories — Developed abbreviated Domain Analysis Models (DAM) and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) template structures for Electronic Public Health Case Reporting.

Clinical Registry Systems & Exchange Specifications

  • Illinois Department of Public Health — Engineered data export message profiles utilizing model-driven tools to securely extract clinical datasets from the State Trauma Registry for research and public policy analytics.

  • American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma — Designed the National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) Information Exchange Specifications and normative CDA Implementation Guides to enable secure clinical data submissions from provider facilities to registry data collectors.

  • The American College of Cardiology — Managed multi-phase transaction framework projects to build and ballot custom HL7 CDA implementation guides and IHE content profiles for the CathPCI and Electrophysiology registries.

  • National Center for Health Statistics — Updated the foundational Vital Records Domain Analysis Model governing electronic information flows for national birth, death, and fetal death reporting.

Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) & Business Intelligence (BI)

  • Columbia HCA — Supervised enterprise historical repository scoping, patient administration analysis, and deployed consolidated billing/payment processing analytical datamarts.

  • Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital — Formulated architectural roadmaps to scale metadata pipelines and engineered transitional data lakes alongside star-schema layouts for a pharmacy datamart.

  • Healthcare Partners — Evaluated core workflow metrics and structured investment justifications for senior executives during foundational enterprise warehouse planning phases.

  • Hennepin County Medical Center — Authored a strategic migration blueprint transitioning legacy disparate reporting systems into a unified model-driven enterprise business intelligence landscape.

  • Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute — Conducted comprehensive enterprise SWOT assessments to establish structured roadmaps for data integration frameworks and corporate intelligence layers.

Research Informatics & Clinical Trials Systems

  • City of Hope National Medical Center — Directed the RISE and Architecture divisions, overseeing large engineering squads deploying platforms for patient enrollment, cancer registries, Enterprise Data Warehouses, and Adverse Event Reporting Systems (caAERS / caLAEGS).

  • Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) — Spearheaded repeatable UML documentation modeling standards and facilitated drafting testing parameters for Clinical Trial Registration and Results (CTRR) message patterns.

  • Digital Infuzion, Inc. — Served as an expert advisor providing technical oversight on clinical trials repository designs targeted for FDA Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) operations.

  • NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology — Standardized unified modeling language guides and built canonical data warehouse layers to support open source semantic interoperability across shared research fields.

Immunization Integration & Specialized Registries

  • California Department of Health (CLPPB) — Mapped childhood lead exposure registries to logical, physical, and relational design equivalents to track environmental health markers (RASSCLE II).

  • California Department of Health (Immunization Branch) — Assembled technical consensus frameworks and managed request-for-proposal vectors integrating disparate local databases into the California State Immunization Information System (SIIS).

  • HLN Consulting — Configured terminology service libraries to parse and validate coded messaging fields embedded within Unsolicited Vaccine Administration updates.

  • Los Angeles County Dept of Children and Family Services — Modeled operational parameters and secure user access points to introduce the electronic Suspected Child Abuse Reporting System (ESCARS).

  • University of California – Irvine — Created standard dictionaries and specialized Domain Analysis Models to harmonize exercise medicine terminology (THEMES).

Health Information Exchanges (HIE) & Interface Architecture

  • Kaiser Permanente — Formulated foundational strategies to achieve clinical data dataset alignment and standardize baseline Electronic Data Interchange protocols across regional hubs.

  • Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. — Developed generic HL7 laboratory integration architectures designed to lower interface deployment costs for external diagnostic vendors.

  • MedQuist, Inc. — Conducted deep performance audits to resolve heavy message packet processing friction inside real-time communication modules.

  • MedVirginia — Provided technical mapping blueprints to convert aging legacy message syntaxes into robust structured document layers.

  • dbMotion — Enhanced core vendor dictionary platforms to establish strict native alignments with global reference information structures.

  • Los Angeles Network for Enhanced Services — Advised ongoing onboarding procedures and participant readiness tests for the regional safety-net health information exchange (LANES).

Global Consulting, Defense, & Professional SDO Leadership

  • Health Level Seven (HL7) — Led technical updates to cross-align the international HDF framework with core UML profiles and drafted formal reference manuals used by the global organization.

  • U.S. Army Theater Systems Integration Office (Europe) — Managed extensive in-country clinical ecosystem assessments to draft long-term integrated hospital requests for proposals on behalf of a key allied foreign military force.

  • International Institute for Safety in Medicine (Switzerland) — Engineered semantic backbone architectures and eliminated data modeling anomalies for multinational

  •  pharmacovigilance tracking engines.

  • NEMSIS Technical Assistance Center / University of Utah — Built national emergency pre-hospital standard domain models, enabling localized ambulance data to successfully aggregate into a unified countrywide data vault.

  • Canada Infoway Standards Collaborative / MD Anderson / National Quality Forum — Structured baseline technical curricula to prepare cross-border developers, clinical analysts, and federal coordinators for baseline standardization exams.