About Me

I started my IT career in the third grade. No joke! That year my parents decided to buy a home computer to do school work on. (It was a Tandy 1000, 8088XT, with no hard drive, and 128k RAM for those that are interested) They refused to buy any games for it though and so I decided I’d have to write my own. That led to learning how to use BASIC and transcribing code directly from print magazines.

I got my ham radio license (KW4YB, although initially it was KB9JKX) in seventh grade and started volunteering in a storm spotting role with the local ESDA department. Of course, I couldn’t drive so in order to go spotting my mom had to drive me to the emergency operations center and then I’d ride with someone else. I also noticed those guys on the ambulance squad had way cooler pagers than we did…

So after graduating high school I joined the ambulance and became an EMT. That led to working in the emergency department and eventually becoming an ER nurse. In the ED we were having some issues tracking clean and dirty beds so I wrote a little windows application that could manage it. When I sent it to IT for approval to run I got a call from the nurse manager that originally hired me in the ED. She said there was a project afoot to “go paperless” and wondered if I’d have an interest in coming to IT to work on the implementation of an electronic medical record.



Next thing I know I’m an Epic analyst. After doing the install there I moved to Richmond Virginia to install Epic at a larger health system. It was there that I began to delve into the technical workings of the EHR and develop some adjunct applications. Before leaving a colleague and I developed and launched OptimOrder, a SaaS order set management solution. I then went into consulting which is where you find me today!