I started at the bedside. Emergency department, then charge nurse, then CPOE
superuser: the person other nurses came to when the system fought them at 3 a.m.
That's where I learned the thing you can't get from a requirements document.
A workflow isn't broken because it was badly designed. It's broken because
somebody designed it without ever having to use it under pressure.
So I moved into the build. EMR implementation, then corporate deployment, then
product ownership. Today I direct clinical systems strategy across a multi-state
network: multiple enterprise EMR platforms, hundreds of clinical users, and a
multimillion-dollar vendor portfolio. I set the roadmap, negotiate the contracts,
and answer for the outcome.
And I still write code. SQL against 600+ table clinical schemas. Python for the
automation that runs nightly. The multi-agent architecture that routes
PHI-bearing work away from commercial models. When a vendor tells me a defect
can't be reproduced, I go find it myself, and I usually do.
The combination is rare on purpose. Clinical credibility gets the roadmap
adopted. Engineering depth gets it built. Governance literacy gets it approved.