Bioinformaticist. Venture Altruist. Biohacker. Burner. Xinnial. Healthcare Worker. Snarky.

So, yeah. I've been hacking on computers for probably 35 years now. First open-source project was in the late 90s, related to a Black and Scholes Option Pricing Calculator I wrote while a computing lab tech at the UChicago Graduate School of Business. I can neither confirm nor deny whether a spoofed packet to a local trading company resulted in me touring my way through the Chicago Board of Trade server room before they realized I wasn't an MBA student.

Since then, for the past 20 years, I've worked in healthcare IT in some capacity or another. I have two degrees with the word 'Medicine' in them.... History of Science and Medicine (PreMed) and Biomedical Informatics. So, I basically help keep the country's hospital infrastructure running. Otherwise, all self-taught when it comes to programming.

After college, I wound up working as an MRI Tech and then PACS Administrator and Radiology Administrator at a large hospital in Brooklyn. Nuclear medicine is cool. I was on the rollout team of one of the first integrated Cerner Millennium EHR installations, and that led to me basically doing a residency at the hospital, as I rotated from department to department, doing workflow analysis and figuring out how we were going to install our new Medical Imaging Network throughout the hospital. Most of my open source work at the time was in .NET and involved medical image analysis.

After HITECH and the ACA were passed, I was burned out from constant 24/7 on-call support of the Emergency Department, so I moved over to the vendor side to help develop product. It's been a decade of consulting and freelancing since then. Mostly the same needs each time. Folks need an app or website that's either a) HIPAA compliant, b) FDA ready, or c) connects to an EHR. Do it enough times, and you figure out some common best-practices, which is how the Meteor Cookbook came about (with 1,700 stars, probably my most successful open-source project to date).

You ever watch NCIS? With Abby off in the laboratory doing her goth-chick thing? It's not too far off the mark. I'm not quite so gothed out, but my life is a surreal montage of sci-fi work at times. Growing up as a Watson, I regularly get people asking me what I know about genetics, artificial intelligence, telecommunications, medical malpractice, etc. It's a schtick, it's fun, I enjoy it. And somewhere along the way, I started developing my own workbench and tech stack and doing my own science. But that montage of sci-fi consulting is how I got involved with BitPonics, SpaceCapsule, MeteorPackaging, VisExcell, and various other orgs you might see in my profile or LinkedIn profile.

Anyhow, when MACRA and 21st Century Cures were passed (mandating interoperability protocols), I went all-in on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), which is how Meteor on FHIR got started. Don't be fooled by the number of stars. I've had to rebuild that repository a few times, for both security and strategy reasons, which would reset its star count. It's underselling it's value.

I eventually began a soft fork of the Meteor stack, and released a "Clinical" track that was optimized for security, quality control, and interoperability. Which is how the Clinical Meteor organization got set up. We were hand-crafting packages for each resource to figure out the pattern of what dependencies and functionalities each resource would want to pull in, which is how ~200 packages got developed in that organization. They're most all MIT licensed, and have been used in 70 or 80 prototypes or pilots at this point in time.

Eventually, we started figuring out the overall design pattern that the FHIR protocol was evolving towards, which was a mix of telephone switchboard and network router patterns. We were greatly inspired by the Mirth OpenConnect and WordPress, both products I had often used during the aughts. That is, each FHIR resource runs over its own communication channel; and we bundle that all up in a WordPress like tech stack that supports a plugin architecture. And that's the general idea behind Node on FHIR.

And that's how I wound up writing my own bioinformatics workbench software using the latest FHIR interoperability protocols and libraries. Sweet. You can write plugins for it and use it to connect to local hospital EHR systems. It's core is open source. It's good for blockchain DApp infrastructure. You're welcome. ;)