What is this?

I’ve been working in healthcare technology and digital health for awhile. During that period of time I’ve worked on a wide variety of problems with a chunk of lessons learned. Most of my writings were on quora, reddit, a medium from when that was a thing, and the netlify from Datica that is still running even though that company crossed the rainbow bridge awhile ago.

I write mostly to capture my thoughts, especially on complicated topics that seem to be at the forefront of what innovators and developers seem to be interested in. I try to view challenges in healthcare from the perspective of the data challenges to solve them. This doesn’t mean that the challenges of clinicians and patients are not the primary objective; they are. However, I often find myself ensuring that for every person who wants to solve those challenges that they enter the arena humble, equipped and optimistic.

A brief CV:

  • I studied History and American Studies in college. While being interested in pre-law, I managed to take almost all of my math and science electives in Computer Science and gained a real taste for it. This does not matter much except in that I find that the history of healthcare and healthcare technology often holds a lot of answers when it comes to challenges and solutions.

  • Despite having no plan when graduating from college after realizing that being a lawyer was not the path for me, I got at job at Epic based on a referral from my old lifeguarding boss from Summer Camp as a kid. I immediately loved healthcare technology. And being at Epic during the pre-MU to MU1 phase was a front row seat to the EHR growth zeitgeist and the digitalization of medicine.

  • After working in implementation for almost five years, I left Epic because being the most technical person in implementation didn’t really matter at a company that valued software developers above all. I believed if I could program and make apps and tech that I could do a bunch to improve healthcare. While on this initial journey to being a programmer I wrote some software, started a company and learned some hard lessons about startups during the early days of “Digital Health”

  • That journey led me to Datica (née Catalyze), where I led up building our data integration business with my friends and colleagues. I spent a lot of time helping application developers build solutions that were well integrated into clinical solutions. One of my larger projects was helping a large medical device company build a centralized, normalized, data store using FHIR as the translating entity across all business divisions.

  • Datica was bought by another company which then called itself Datica. A colleague from Verily saw a presentation of mine at a FHIR conference and referred me for a job. I loved the possibility of working on large scale solutions and partnerships (as well as, yes, a FAANG job). I got to work with many of the smartest and humble people in my life.

  • However, two months after starting at Verily COVID hit. Most of my projects were delayed or cancelled to focus on COVID tracking and surveillance. Not a bad call but also not what I wanted to be doing. Of new opportunities on the table was working on ultrasound tech at Butterfly Network. I had done a bit of radiology imaging processing at Butterfly but no where on the scale that we did it at Butterfly. Over the last two years I PM’d the team working on our data processing pipelines, giving us better flexibility and processing power for DICOM and HL7 messaging. I also supervised our PM who was leading up our efforts for patient self-scanning. This is where I am at today.

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Healthcare data expert. I've spearheaded integrations at over 500 health systems and helped hundreds of companies with their healthcare data challenges