From pharmacy school to clinician-engineer

I typically describe my pharmacy journey as quite traditional as I followed the typical pharmacy school + residency route. I attended pharmacy school at the University of Florida from 2009 - 2013, but also got my bachelors of science in Human Nutrition there as well from 2005-2009. During my pharmacy school years, I was primarily interested in hospital practice in areas such as critical care, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and oncology. My APPE experiences reflected that as well as they were predominantly acute care rotations in different hospitals around Florida.

From 2013 - 2014, I completed my PGY-1 Pharmacy Practice residency at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida. Although that was quite typical, it was also one of the first times I had begun exploring other areas of pharmacy that piqued my interest such as public health and pharmacy informatics. At the time, I had narrowed my clinical interest to infectious disease and had plans to pursue an infectious disease fellowship, namely Michael Rybak’s fellowship. However, I had a bit of a pivot due to a few things. One of which, was a phone call I had with Melinda Neuhauser, a pharmacist that had previously led the CDC’s Antimicrobial Usage and Resistance (AUR) module back in 2013. Given my interest in both infectious disease and informatics, my odds of landing at the CDC would be much higher if I gained further experience in the latter as she described how difficult it was to benchmark antimicrobial usage data from disparate hospitals for the CDC’s AUR module. This, along with the Pharmacy Forecast 2013-2017 helped drive my PGY-2 applications towards pharmacy informatics and consequently completed my PGY-2 in Pharmacy Informatics at the University of Utah Health.

My first job, post-residency, was an informatics pharmacist at Mayo Clinic. I was part of the “Plummer Project” team that converted the 300+ disparate systems used across the organization into a single, electronic health record: Epic. The project took place between 2015 - 2019 and was scoped as four different go-lives: Mayo Clinic Health System - Wisconsin, Mayo Clinic Health System - Minnesota, Rochester, and Arizona & Florida. My primary role was in leading the implementation of the various infectious diseases programs, notably Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Prevention and Control. I was also a key member in implementing the clinical decision support systems at Mayo Clinic during that time and supported specialty provider content and pharmacy. The project formally ended on January 1, 2019.

Aside from the wealth of experience I gained during the Epic go-lives, I also started a part-time, online MPH program at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in January 2018. Over the next 2.5 years, I’d learn a completely different perspective in approaching problem-solving at a population level and shifted my interests towards making a larger impact. Further, it was also during this time that I had the opportunity to complete both my practicum and capstone at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT from June 2019 - May 2020. The experience at the ONC provided a unique experience into health IT regulations at I was able to contribute to the 21st Century Cures Act as it pertained to the ONC’s Interoperability Rules that were finalized in 2020. Lastly, it was likely due to the experiences in the MPH program + the ONC that fueled my desire to tackle healthcare interoperability.

As my interests in healthcare interoperability grew, I began to look for new opportunities in how I can best leverage my skills in a new way in November 2021. After working in hospital and health systems for more than a decade, with a short stint in federal government during my time at the ONC, I was intrigued with opportunities to make an impact in the tech industry. Over the course of 5 months, I began to apply to various tech companies focused on addressing healthcare interoperability issues, but also kept an open-mind as I included industries in federal government, public health, management consulting, and academia as well.

After nearly 100+ job applications, I decided to embark on a new journey with Verily, an Alphabet company, to make precision health a reality.

Over the next three years, I went from Senior to Staff Clinical Informatics Data Architect. Most of my work was translating clinical knowledge into FHIR: modeling care pathways, building terminology services, and working closely with engineering, product, and clinical teams on how our care platforms represented and exchanged health data. I was also appointed to Verily’s FHIR Council, which set company-wide FHIR guidance. Somewhere along the way, in September 2024, I started teaching myself full-stack development, which turned out to matter more than I expected. In 2025, I resigned to become a full-time caregiver for my grandma.

In February 2025, my grandma was admitted to the hospital and her doctor recommended hospice. I took FMLA the following month to be with her, and a few months later I resigned from Verily to care for her full-time. She improved enough to be discharged from hospice that August, and to care for her as well as I could, I started CNA training in September and became a licensed Certified Nursing Assistant in January 2026. Grandma passed away in January 2026. I wrote about our time together in 10.5 months of borrowed time.

Caregiving also showed me, firsthand, how much of care coordination falls on families. I had spent my career on healthcare interoperability, yet I was the one carrying her records between doctors, pharmacies, and the nursing home. So I built a small app for my own family to manage it, and in November 2025 it grew into haau3, a company that tackles the interoperability problems caregivers face so they can coordinate care more easily. haau3 is free to use, and in July 2026 it became one of the first apps in CMS’s new Medicare App Library. Alongside it, I keep teaching through OpenClinTech, training the next generation of clinician-engineers.