Development/Tech General Experience
-
Writing and maintaining clear and understandable documentation. This is possibly the most important part of technology, and an activity I particularly enjoy.
-
Leading agile development in practice, understanding the roles, ceremonies, and ‘sweet spots’ of this development strategy (as well as appreciating other strategies, in order to be able to work well with other teams who may work differently)
-
Optimising developer workflow and development environments for consistency and productivity, using modern tools and approaches such as ‘infrastructure-as-code’
-
Productive and effective remote working, and the
-
Version control with Git and GitHub, semantic versioning and Git branching strategies
-
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) design, versioning and client libraries
-
Cloud deployment and storage technologies - Heroku, AWS EC2, AWS S3, Digital Ocean
-
Containerization strategies and tools: Docker, docker-compose, Docker Hub, LXC
-
Vagrant, Vault, Packer and similar
-
Linux user for last 5 years, fluent in *nix - also an experienced Windows and Mac user
Without resorting to an exhaustive list of tools, languages and frameworks I have used and worked with, I’ll list a few of my favourites
-
Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework
-
Ember.js javascript frontend framework
-
Ansible - agentless automated provisioning system
-
Neo4j - native, highly performant graph database ideal for clinical ontologies
-
Reveal.js - open source presentation framework
Healthcare Technology Experience
Through my involvement in the RCGP Health Informatics Group, the Joint GP IT Committee, and a variety of contract and substantive posts across NHS IT, I have had close working experience which includes, but is not limited to, the following healthcare related technologies:
-
NHS Spine Services including GP Connect, e-Referral Service (e-RS), e-Prescription Service (EPS)
-
‘Ripple Stack’ (openEHR / QEWD.js / EtherCIS / Pulsetile UI) https://ripple.foundation/
-
SNOMED-CT clinical terminology https://www.snomed.org/ and its predecessors CTV3 and ReadV2, as well as other coding schemes used internationally eg ICD-10
-
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource) https://www.hl7.org/fhir/
-
openEHR https://openehr.org/ as a standard, and also experience data modelling using this technology, and working with concrete implementations such as EtherCIS and EhrBase.
-
Opal healthcare application framework https://opal.openhealthcare.org.uk/
-
OpenEyes open source ophthalmology system https://openeyes.org.uk/
-
HL7v2, EDIFACT and similar widely-used but legacy technologies.
I have a keen appreciation of the wider NHS technology ecosystem, the many organisations which inhabit this space, their relative roles and responsibilities, and the politics and interplay between them. My informatics career has enabled me to work and make personal connections with many individuals in these organisations, and these relationships then help when building cooperation between organisations in order to deliver better tech.
My exposure to a broad spectrum of NHS technology work has given me insight into the regulatory environment surrounding healthcare technology and familiarity with key EU and UK legislation such as the Medical Device Regulation, GDPR, Falsified Medicines Directive, the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the updated 2019 Data Protection Act as well as notable publications and reports such as the Caldicott reports.
Discourse
I have become an experienced developer and sysadmin of the Discourse open source forum platform, running a number of Discourse instances both commercially and on a non-profit basis. Discourse Contributor, and Discourse plugin developer, as part of my membership of thePavilion.io tech co-op.
I believe in the necessity for open conversation about NHS technology, and to this end have used Discourse to bring open fora to NHS tech where I have been able to do so.