The best problems to solve are your own
One of the hardest parts of being a caregiver isn’t the care itself. Rather, it’s the coordination and communication involved. In 2023, my grandma lived with my sister in Florida, I was in Virginia, my brother was serving overseas, and my parents were five hours south of my sister. Coordinating something as basic as a doctor’s visit became a logistical nightmare. Language barriers and continuity of information added to the challenge. As I step into a full-time caregiving role, I’m realizing the best problems to solve are your own.
In this article, I'd like to share a bit more into my experience, notably the challenges, in hopes that we create better solutions for other caregivers and their loved ones. As a bonus, I recently launched a caregivers app (link) for myself and my family to use to mitigate some of the problems we've identified as a nod to Paul Graham's 2012 essay: How to Get Startup Ideas.
Using FHIR to Optimize Clinical Artificial Intelligence
I have to admit, I have a lot of #FOMO with the ubiquitous hype of artificial intelligence (AI). Especially its use in healthcare. It's exciting to see the variety of applications explored, notably those from large language model (LLM)-based, foundation models, like ambient scribes and semantic search, but I'm most intrigued with clinical reasoning. I'm also extremely skeptical of deploying them into production use cases in our healthcare systems from a safety and efficacy perspective.
Because of this, I've actually embarked on a bit of a side quest in 2024 to focus my efforts in diving deeper into Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) because I think that it allows us to aggregate higher quality data from disparate systems that can be used to create benchmark datasets for improving these foundation models.
In this article, I want to explore a few thoughts I have about training, evaluating, and deploying clinical AI, with a focus on clinical reasoning, into production systems. For the purposes of this article, I use LLMs, foundation models, and clinical AI interchangeably with clinical AI focusing on the reasoning application.
My Experience Cracking the HL7 FHIR Certifications (R4 & Foundation)
Gaining proficiency in Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (#FHIR) has been high on my list of professional goals ever since I joined Verily in April 2022. Though, aside from just learning it, I wanted a way to measure whether I actually understood the material. After a bit of browsing for FHIR resources (pun intended), I came across Health Level Seven International's certifications and saw that one existed for HL7 FHIR R4 Proficiency and knew that I'd sit for the exam at some point in the future. Further, HL7 introduced a new set of FHIR certifications in 2024, including a new 'Foundation' certification that replaces HL7 FHIR R4 Proficiency which will retire in December 2024. Of course, I also added that to my list of professional goals.
As of last month, I sat for and passed both exams and received the certifications. In this article, I want to describe my experience preparing for and taking the two exams.