Hello, Visitor!🙏

Welcome to my personal blog, which serves as a sort of 'personal canvas' that helps me share my story as a software professional. I try to blog when I am able to, on topics such as health informatics, software development, as well as other topics such as history, science, and books. Recently, I started creating interactive quizzes on a variety of topics, which I believe are essential for any modern software development professional. Originally, these quizzes were created to help in my own learning and for presentations to my colleagues and clients, but have started making them available online so others might benefit from them. Your insights and interactions are warmly welcomed on these blog posts, articles, as well as quizzes, so we can collectively learn and grow together. Cheers!

The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you. ~ B.B. King, American blues musician

My HL7 Tutorials

HL7 is a family of cooperating standards which collectively help provide a set of organizational frameworks and guidelines to help in the design, implementation, administration and operationalization of systems that perform healthcare-related information exchange in an electronic format. The various standards contained within the larger HL7 umbrella (such as V2, V3, FHIR, CDA, etc) help define how patient care and any care provider-related information is communicated between the various parties involved. Kmowledge of these standards is vital to enable these disparate parties to exchange timely and critical healthcare data using standardized data types and a structured vocabulary set needed to achieve seamless integration between the various electronic health systems involved. My HL7 Tutorials should take someone with a background in any object-oriented language (C# or Java is preferrable) and illustrate how the static as well as runtime behavior of systems built using the HL7 standard will look like. I have recently added a small interactive quiz on HL7 topics to engage the learner. I plan to make this much more comprehensive in the future to benefit learners pursuing certifications in the health informatics area.

My DICOM Tutorials

DICOM is a healthcare standard responsible for governing nearly all aspects of medical imaging such as image transmission, image interpretation, print management, procedure management and off-line storage, and is used in nearly all healthcare-related imaging “modalities” such as magnetic resonance, nuclear medicine, computed tomography and ultrasound. Nearly all clinical imaging workflows around the world are based on the DICOM standard. Learning this standard is vital if you work or want to work in the healthcare informatics industry.

My DICOM Tutorials are a series of short and focused articles aimed at someone who is starting with DICOM and wants to understand the theory by relating to some practical code examples. DICOM is an extremely large standard (some 6000 pages and growing each day) and is intimidating even to those who work with it on a daily basis. My tutorials are an attempt to provide a "digest version" of the many areas in the standard. These articles do not require any prior healthcare background or knowledge from the readers. Only a background in any object-oriented programming language such as C#, Java or C++ is required. I have recently added a small interactive quiz on DICOM topics to engage the learner. I plan to make this much more comprehensive in the future to benefit learners pursuing certifications in the health informatics area.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. ~ Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher

My Interactive Quizzes

In an effort to make my blog articles more engaging, I've crafted a series of interactive quizzes encompassing a variety of topics pertinent to the realm of health informatics. These include pivotal areas such as HL7 (V2, V3 and FHIR), DICOM, Web Security, REST APIs, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), regulatory standards and risk assessment frameworks (including HIPAA, SOC Framework and GDPR), on software programming including data structures and algorithms as well as software development concepts and best practices.

Over the years, I have come to strongly believe that quizzes are a great conduit for learning and act as catalysts for memory retention, allowing us to actively recall and apply information, which strengthens cognitive connections. Moving forward, my plan is to broaden the quiz topics and refine existing ones, such as HL7, DICOM and web security, to be more modular, thereby allowing learners the flexibility to engage with concise, manageable units at their preferred pace.