Greg Van de Mosselaer
(he/him)

Greg Van de Mosselaer
(he/him)

I am a family and emergency physician and full-stack IT developer.

My interest in programming blends well with my medical background. I concentrate primarily on developing Medical IT solutions. I find what I learn in each discipline informs my approach to the other. My combined experience in both fields has lead me to the realization that information is a medical device.

Medical IT is rapidly reshaping how we practice medicine, probably more so than any other tool at this time in the evolution of medicine as a discipline. Despite this, a full understanding of programming itself is beyond the domain of knowledge that an average, well-rounded physician could be reasonably expected to maintain. This is a problem because these tools are disruptive and important and yet out of the comprehensive reach of the users they effect. There are courses and degrees that tease around the edges of how the two disciplines interact but few practitioners of one discipline leap into the other's fuller nature. Naturally, not every health practitioner needs to be a programmer! However, I feel that the field of medicine can benefit if some are. I used to think that an expedition like this constituted a kind of heresy particularly since I have yet to return. I have come to realize that it is orthodoxy. D.T.Campbell made a case for this sort of approach quite effectively in his 1968 landmark; "Ethnocentrism of disciplines and the fish-scale model of omniscience". 

My projects have a common purpose. I am seeking to involve health care practitioners in the iterative design of Medical IT solutions not just by consultation but at the programming level when they wish to be. This tightens the feedback loop between user and programmer, making a new kind of development possible. Onto that, I layer the AGILE approach on software development for maximum flexibility. I want to bring this approach into the front lines of Medical IT solution development. The AGILE approach's ability to deliver robust and useful solutions quickly and low-cost while avoiding costly missteps has been a positive change engine in other fields. It is time for those efficiencies to start finding their way into more medical environments.