This post is part of a series of interviews with the DIG engineers. We introduce you to an engineer, and give you a peek into what it’s like to work for DIG. If you’re interested in a career with DIG, check out our current positions.
What team are you on?
I am on the Liontower team. We focus on caregiver experience for Virtual Visit as well as providing the backend for virtual and other visit-types. We’re a full-stack team.
What do you do?
I am a senior developer, so I spend a lot of my time mentoring the other engineers on the team, doing high-level design work and helping people make decisions on how to best implement things. I also spend a lot of time talking to stakeholders and engineers on other teams to help make the best software end to end.
What brought you to DIG?
I started at DIG as a consultant. As a consultant, I took pride in my clients always asking me to stay on full time after projects, and at DIG that started happening soon after I started. DIG was the first place I ever really considered.
After 10.5 years of consulting, the quality of people at DIG and the mission of Providence resonated strongly with me.
What made you stay?
I’ve been here for 3 years now and stay for the same reasons that I joined. I see that the work I’m doing makes a difference. Also, I still enjoy the people I work with. The team is not only committed to the mission, but also to being excellent engineers and delivering exceptional software.
Tell me about a recent project that affected patients or providers.
The shared provider pool! The goal was to take greater advantage of resources that we have available. So, it used to be that we had two kinds of providers that interacted with our products: Those that were full-time dedicated to Virtual Visits, and others that were dedicated to Express Care clinics. We discovered that express care clinic providers had a lot of downtime between appointments. There was an idea to better utilize these caregivers by giving them virtual visit appointments during those slow times.
There’s a lot of complex scheduling logic involved with both of those instances so that you can ensure there’s no cross-appointment conflict. We worked across multiple teams to ensure the scheduling logic worked and did not overwhelm caregivers. At the end of the day, we wanted to enable providers to give the best care they could.
Beyond that, there was a lot of cross-team collaboration to ensure all the information landed in the right places, and that everything was properly integrated with the electronic health record system.
What was your part in this project?
I was the technical lead of our team. My favorite part was working closely with all the different teams for any cross-cutting concerns. There were a lot of in-depth discussions around where the logic should live, how to better leverage APIs across team boundaries and making sure the info landed right.
I really enjoyed working through this complex problem and working with a bunch of different engineers. We went through a lot of planning and discussion and managed to hit all our project deliverables.
Now, it’s in high use with minimal issues.
Sounds like there was a lot of cross-team collaboration on this project. Is that standard?
There are very few projects that are not cross-team because of the nature of how we develop products. For example, we always work with mobile because they’re consuming our APIs. There are minimal silos in DIG.
What are you most excited about in health tech?
I’m excited to see where the next big innovation lies. There are so many ways to improve access to health care and the quality of health care. There’s so much work to be done and deciding where to go next is the most exciting.
What would you tell a new person thinking about joining your team?
They should join my team if they are excited about doing work that makes a difference in people’s lives, and if they want a team that challenges them in positive ways. We are all trying to do the best-possible work and hold each other to the highest standards.
Fun fact about yourself?
I have circumnavigated the globe three times; each time took 30 days.
