Overview
As a part-time Medic, Firefighter, and pre-med student, I was acutely aware of many complex multi-stakeholder healthcare problems. Some are policy-bound, some are technology-bound. Many are both.
I knew I wanted to tackle the problem of getting the right care to the right patients are the right time, and there are entire patient populations in the USA where that remains difficult because of US policy governing healthcare interoperability, medical records, and social determinants of health.
We built not just a tech demo but the foundations for a legal and technological platform that would empower patients to access their medical records in formats that other practitioners (and their EMRs) can use and match patients to the best care providers for their condition.
My Contributions
I brought experience as a technologist and healthcare provider. I'd been frustrated by a lot of Emergency Room and fire house EMRs so poorly done that paper charting was actually preferable. This made me a natural fit to be the product person and engineer for the product team.
In short, I built a 3-tier Ruby on Rails web application with 3 major goals:
1. A care provider matching & rating system. I used the NPI database as a starting point, then built a yelp-like front-end, and used ElasticSearch on the backend.
2. A system to securely ingest & store medical records from different sources, where the patient can organize, browse, search, and own them.
3. A system to simplify medical record release forms, transfer medical records between providers, and verify successful receipt by using APIs, not industry standard fax machines.
