Sorry, no AKAs for me. Intro in brief...
I'm a 73 year-old Mumpster with a strong belief in the importance of good EHRs to good health care. I'll adopt Rick's LIFO ordering to quickly describe my career.
As one of the Vista Expertise Network crew I'm working on becoming the champ at applying VA patches to VistA installations. It has its ups and downs. From 2007-2009 I worked at Western State Hospital in Tacoma, Washington in an attempt to introduce CPRS to their positively ancient DHCP system (that has served them superbly right up to the present day). Figured out how to do it just as the great financial debacle wrecked the state's ability to pay for it. It could still happen one day, with all their 20 years worth of patient data accessible. From around 1991 until now I've on-and-off consulted around various MUMPS and non-MUMPS informatics projects for such as the Seattle Childrens Home, Washington Veterans Home, District of Columbia Dept. of Health, Montgomery County (Maryland) Community Clinics, Nevada Dept. of Public Health. You get it - eclectic. 2001-3 I did a Public Health Informatics Fellowship at C.D.C. in Atlanta, and in 2003-4 served as a Senior Fellow. Got saturated with RDBs and SQL. No MUMPS there. Between 1982 and now I've served on the faculties of U.C, Davis Medical School and U.W. Medical School, teaching Family Medicine, and the U.W. School of Public Health, teaching Informatics. From 1979 to 2001 I practiced clinical Family Medicine in St. Helens, OR, Sacramento, Tacoma, and Atlanta. I did medical school and residency from 1974-79 at SUNY, Stony Brook and Emanuel Hospital in Portland. From 1962-74 I taught neurophysiology at NYU Medical School and SUNY, Stony Brook Medical School and pursued basic research in neurophysiology at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. I received my PhD in neurobiology from CalTech in 1961.
It's been a long road and an interesting one. From building my first analog and digital computers with soldering iron and circuit boards I etched myself, to multicore CPUs and gigbit networks and terabyte hard drives - you can see why I delight in good EHRs.
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