History with HIPAA


Pacific Health Research & Education Institute

Data Manager (Full-time) · Honolulu, Hawai'i · 1/2013 - 1/2016

Performed duties as a member of a research team for a NIH diabetes study (GRADE) including meeting with patients, processing lab specimens, etc. Also, served as IT liaison for the team, and developed custom software to improve day-to-day operations as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis.

  • Developed a workflow and case management system with built-in reporting, scheduling and EHR features while handling other responsibilities as part of the research team.

  • Developed an application that interfaced with a legacy console application (VistA), parsed text reports and generated PDF reports performing tasks in seconds that previously took hours.

  • Coached researchers on creating complex SQL queries to query data-warehouse

Ruby Java JavaScript Clojure Datomic PostgreSQL Git VistA Windows Linux HIPAA Scheduling EHR EMR Workflow Healthcare Health-Research Product-Design Mentoring SQL Microsoft-Access Scheduling-System


Pacific Health Research & Education Institute

Programmer / Analyst (Full-time) · Honolulu, Hawai'i · 12/2009 - 12/2011

Served as staff programmer on two NIH cancer studies (PLCO and NLST), developed custom data management, workflow and case management applications as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis. I was laid off at the close of the studies (along with the rest of the staff) then re-hired a year later to work on the GRADE study.

  • Developed custom data management, workflow and case management applications as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis which allowed me to provide critical study statics and reports at a moments notice.

  • Developed methods for dealing with some very complex logistical constraints imposed on the studies.

  • Added a feature to Ruby’s “gem” command to install gems from a directory. This was necessary since the study’s computers were not allowed to connect to the Internet (see https://github.com/delonnewman/rubygems).

  • Saved the institute thousands of dollars in software and hardware purchases

  • Designed various workflow systems using Ruby on Rails and MySQL

  • Developed micro services in Ruby & Sinatra that could be used by various of these workflow systems and desktop applications

  • Developed desktop applications in Python and Qt.

  • Integrated web applications into a standard Windows desktop configuration for staff of over 50 research assistants.

  • Started my quest to understand the challenges involved with modeling healthcare, biological and other sparsely structured data.

Ruby Rails Sinatra Perl Python Qt JavaScript C# Git SSH PuTTY MySQL REST Microsoft-Access VBA Windows Ubuntu Linux HIPAA Health-Research Product-Design Micro-services Web-services Dashboards TDD Workflow