Healthcare Developers Need to Educate Each Other and the World

Educate each other and the world — It is our duty to spread knowledge from a unique vantage point. That’s one of the Redox values, and it makes me super excited about what we’re doing at Redox and what my hope is for this Medium publication.

I’ve been a software developer for over 8 years. My first job, at Epic gave a lot of opportunities to educate my immediate team (~15 people) and the whole department (~200 people), but never the outside world. When I joined Redox as employee #2, I pumped out blog content with little regard for any elements of good writing or style. I’ve experimented with sharing some of the innovative things we’ve done as well.

I am excited that we as a healthcare developer community have a lot more stories to tell. At Redox we’re doing some wildly innovative stuff:

• Processing HL7v2 messages at a scale never done before
• Combining the APIs of dozens of fragmented EHR systems in one platform
• Building a world-class security organization
• Designing data models that empower developers and keep patients safe
• Doing all of the above 100% in the cloud

I know there are many of you out there who have similar stories to tell as well. Many of you are already part of the Redox network. We’re happy to publish your content here, and if you’re on the fence, consider subscribing.

Writing about development makes you a better developer — better healthcare developers means we fix healthcare

I remember the a-ha moment when I realized that writing made me a better developer. It was very early in my career and I was writing a design. At Epic, design is a pretty well-defined process, I knew who would be reading and approving my ideas. As I was banging away at a Word document, my brain started to drift into the what I imagined my colleagues, many of them with strong personalities would say. I felt like a boxer, dodging and weaving my way through potential objections through my words.

Writing is an incredibly powerful tool. It’s the closest thing we have to that scene in the Matrix where Neo says “I know kung fu”. Good and even average writing invites the reader into the writer’s brain.

The Redox Dev team has our own set of values and one that rings truest for me is context over control. The sentiment is that decisions must be made quickly and by the people closest to the problem. That means we must share context instead of trying to exert control. This is necessary to move fast, scale the team, and ultimately have a team capable of owning product and business outcomes

The Redox Dev team has our own set of values and one that rings truest for me is “context over control”

When it comes to transferring context few mediums are as efficient and accessible as writing.

Welcome to the Redox-Techblog

That’s the pitch — we have potential to change healthcare forever with technology. Many of us are already doing cool stuff. As we share more, we fix problems faster and more elegantly than before.