This post is part of a series of interviews with the DIG team. We introduce you to a team member and give you a peek into what it’s like to work for us. If you’re interested in a career with DIG, check out our current positions.
Bill is a senior software engineer on the backend team building the next generation of health care platforms.
Why did you come to DIG?
I was at my last employer for 23 years — I am an oddity! When I decided to switch positions, I looked for an opportunity to make a difference. When I retire, I want to look back and know that I built something meaningful and didn’t just improve someone’s bottom line. The health care space was a good place to move into.
The thing that drew me to DIG is how it’s a small self-run unit within a large organization. We have the freedom to behave like a startup with the security of a bigger company, and a direct outlet to immediately test our work on one of the largest health care systems in the nation. We also have a set of folks that immediately provide feedback and guide us in building the correct solutions.
Tell me about your team.
DIG has two backend teams, a platform and an API team. I am on the platform team, which owns services that don’t integrate with any existing hospital systems, like EMRs. We build services that our front-end needs and create applications faster.
Specifically, we own services that power Providence & Swedish’s virtual visits. We also manage the services that enable us to speed up the registration process for a doctor’s appointment, such as pulling in insurance information.
Essentially, we focus on transitioning some of the work that happens in the doctor’s office before you arrive and try to make the whole health care experience more pleasant.
What has been your favorite project so far?
The project where I really feel the impact of my work on health care is virtual visit. We get feedback from the providers and patients on how virtual visits help people daily. Stories of people who use it to solve their health issues in a matter of minutes vs hours is really rewarding.
But from a technical and problem standpoint, my favorite is the insurance card processing project I’m working on. Insurance cards are not standardized in any manner, so extracting information to push it all the way through billing is proving to be a fun challenge.
Tell me more about the insurance card project.
About a year and half ago, a team ran an experiment that proved that you could extract information from an insurance card with enough accuracy that we could process them without human intervention. Now, we’re productionizing it and using it in real life. We work on taking information off the card, submitting real time eligibility checks and pushing it to the electronic medical records system. We take the administrative work off the medical professional’s shoulders.
We’re trying to make it like the modernized banking experience. Instead of walking in with a paper check, you can now just take a picture of the front and back to deposit from your mobile banking app.
You’ve won a DIG hackathon. What was the 2018 winning project?
At the time of the last Spring hackathon, we were moving to kubernetes. My team wanted to figure out how to move testing suites into the new environment and make testing as painless as possible. I focused on setting the framework to run the integration testing and continue releasing quality software.
We won the “Mic drop” award for having a product that was the ready for market.
What’s next at DIG?
I’m really looking forward to the next set of projects. We have a lot more to do with the insurance card and digital registration. But there’s so many interesting problems out there to address in the medical system that I look forward to.
Fun fact about yourself?
I have over 100 cookbooks at home — 45 of which are on my phone at this moment. Cooking is a lot like software engineering; there’s a creative side and a structured side. And I like to eat.
