How long have you worked at IMO, what is your role, and what does it entail?
I have worked at IMO for about 16 years. I am currently a Senior Architect on the Enterprise Architecture team responsible for designing shared platforms across the organization. My role involves observing multiple systems to determine the right technology needed to improve the system overall. It also entails looking for opportunities to expand the use of systems that may exist in various silos across the organization in order to elevate them as a shared platform.
How does your job at IMO add value to our clients?
As we evolve as an organization, our teams strive to build value for clients as efficiently as possible. Sometimes, the delivery of this value to customers may get fragmented across teams. My role is to provide consistency across products. I try to understand how various customers with different needs interact with our array of products. With this understanding, I attempt to build shared platforms that teams can use to deliver their products with a consistent, scalable user experience.
How has working at IMO changed your perspective as a patient, an employee, a manager, or otherwise?
I started my career at IMO right out of college, when it was just a 20-person startup. IMO has provided me with an environment to grow and thrive in my personal and professional life. I have had the opportunity to build services that address billions of mission-critical requests from healthcare systems. And as a patient in the healthcare system, working at IMO has helped me appreciate the complexity and attention to detail it takes to make it all work together — from clinical documentation at the point of care to when I receive the bill from my insurance provider.
And as a patient in the healthcare system, working at IMO has helped me appreciate the complexity and attention to detail it takes to make it all work together — from clinical documentation at the point of care to when I receive the bill from my insurance provider.
What has been your favorite project to work on at IMO and why?
Back in 2008 we delivered content as flat files, sometimes on CDs that were physically mailed! There were various challenges with this approach. In a nutshell, it was hard to adopt our clinical terminology — there were chances that customers would incorrectly implement it, which resulted in a poor user experience. After exploring several open source and commercial products, we decided on building a search engine that would host and serve our content with an application programming interface (API). Customers no longer had to figure out how to effectively load and search our content. They could just call our API to receive the most up to date search results in 100 milliseconds or less! This approach transformed the process of adopting our clinical terminology — months of integration work could now happen in a matter of weeks.
Today, we are on an exciting journey to replace this search technology with another industry standard search technology that has matured over time and can handle IMO’s scale and complexity.
Tell us about a moment, an exchange, or an experience you had at IMO that made you realize, “I’m in the right place.”
One of my favorite company-wide activities is Maker Week. Prior to Maker Week, employees from across the organization pitch ideas that could improve something at IMO — it could be something internal, like automating timesheets, or a new, crazy product idea that could transform the industry. The projects are voted on by the participants and those with enough votes are greenlit. The people who gravitated toward an idea and voted on it then try to implement the idea within the week.
When I see the creative and brilliant ideas that come to life during Maker Week, I know that “I’m in the right place” to learn and grow.
