Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Develop, maintain, and consult on research data ETL processes, on a team of 4 people. Interface with KP Washington Enterprise Information Management to keep apprised of regional initiatives (e.g., changes to underlying business data systems, new data mart releases). Serves as a “data sherpa” to research projects, helping them to refine their questions and goals, and match them to existing data. Consults especially on multi-organization projects (e.g., those done under the auspices of the Health Care Services Research Network).
Established several novel and complex data warehouse Quality Assurance reports, including comparisons between current-build and past-builds, and unique depictions of laboratory results. Investigated seeming-anomalies in prescribing and benefits data, and pushed standards for expressing confidence of complete data capture for HMO enrollees.
Propounded a best-practice convention for production ETL processes which ensures high availability and easy rollback in the case of late-detected defects.
Disseminates knowledge of data, business processes and tools via written articles, wiki documentation, code libraries and oral presentations in multiple venues.
Health Care Systems Research Network (HCSRN)
Led the technical aspects of the HMO Research Network's VDW Operations Committee, including the VDW Implementation Group. This work involved:
Introduced and promoted several software engineering tools/practices to the community of VDW implementers—specifically, source code control, formal issue tracking, and the use of objective, automated quality assurance testing. Worked with the Asset Stewardship and Governing Board of the HMORN to enable open issue tracking (a significant political achievement).
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Provided technical leadership for a distributed team of analysts creating and exploiting a cross-site Virtual Data Warehouse—a federated health services database with a common query interface (in the form of SAS programs). Devised methods for standardizing and sharing common program elements in the form of SAS macros, and wrote a large number of those macros (e.g. for evaluating continuous enrollment, text processing for names and addresses). Maintained Group Health's VDW datasets. Served as project programmer for numerous, concurrently run multi-site studies, negotiating requirements and timelines for cohort extractions, designing cross-site data flows, and creating tracking databases. Designed, implemented and supported a generalized study subject tracking system, with a data/event driven architecture sufficiently flexible to support many diverse studies without the need for reprogramming.
Lockheed-Martin Missles & Space
Designed, developed, tested, debugged and supported data-based application programs using all of the following technologies: SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Designer, Oracle Developer, Visual Basic (Script, .NET, VBA), Microsoft Access, Windows Scripting Host, ASP, ASP.NET, COM, WMI, FoxPro, ADSI, Source Safe and others. Saw projects through all phases of the software development life cycle. Took advantage of locally developed software development standards and source code control infrastructure to create well-documented, maintainable applications. For example, one Oracle Forms application tracked the contents and circulation of a department library of technical manuals. Served as backup Oracle DBA.
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Did various data pulls, integration & reporting to support a rotating portfolio of concurrent research projects, including especially the Cancer Research Network.