The Precision Medicine Initiative

The more data we have, the more we’re going to be able to learn.~ President Obama, February 25, 2016

On Thursday, February 25, 2016, I was honored to be able to do something that was hugely rewarding, professionally and personally. I was able to represent drchrono, joining the White House administration, President Obama, scientific experts, and key medical/tech leaders at a Summit in Washington, D.C. A major part of the focus of the summit included a collaborative announcement on the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). The goal of the collaboration is to bring together the private sector, public sector and government to design and implement a new technology for healthcare.

Digital health is a field that drchrono has been focused on for years. From the start of the company, we have been bringing together many players, having a “let’s work together” open culture, partnering with many different developers and companies. We are convinced that linking medical records together from various Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors is critical in giving a whole picture of the history of a persons care, also bringing in genomics, big data and analytics together will only enhance our understanding for more precise and better healthcare for an individual, helping us understand disease, improving outcomes and helping to lower/contain costs.

We have already started the process by allowing healthcare-focused software developers, companies and Internet of Things (IoT) device organizations to push and pull data from the drchrono platform. The relevant data can then be used when needed. We are in talks with genomics labs and genomics software vendors on how we might be able to bring more relevant data to physicians fingertips. This will help physicians and care professionals make more focused decisions, giving them insights on what medications and procedures have worked successfully in patients like the one they are seeing now that have similar genomic patterns. Physicians and care providers can predict which patients are at risk, and then can deliver appropriate treatments before a patient’s condition worsens, by discovering and seeing these similar genomic patterns.

Around the world we are generating large amounts of data, coming from our new ability to sequence the human genome and our second genome, the microbiome. There are new opportunities to analyze and understand disease onset and progression, and how and why people stay healthy, also on how people get healthy. Genomics is an interesting field for cancer researchers and big data companies. Researchers and industry have started to develop and use tools to understand cancers, via genomic data, looking to help diagnose and treat it. The goal of looking at genomics is to give patients personalize medicine, to understand an individuals illness, environment and to design treatments for that individual. ( Note: Some great software genomics companies worth taking a look at are Station X and Real Time Oncology. )

Providing proper treatment to a person at the right time improves outcomes which in turn lowers cost. Given the right treatment, people get better faster. Precision medicine is valuable in controlling and in reducing care spend.

With Obama’s dogs Bo and Sunny at The White House.

drchrono has worked with InfoGard to get meaningful use Stage 1 and Stage 2 certified, but this is the first time we will be working with the White House directly, joining PMI, specifically the “Sync for Science” pilots. Companies that joined will be working in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. The “Sync for Science” pilots end goal is to develop open standards with electronic health record companies, there are six EHRs working toward this goal, including drchrono. The lessons learned will inform efforts to scale individual data access and donation for precision medicine research, and could be used to support implementation of consumer-mediated data access across the healthcare industry. The data submitted will be based on the patients “opt-in”.

The President’s announcement brought together several hundred people from different organizations that have made commitments. Around forty organizations, including drchrono, made substantial commitments of funding, training, data and other resources to support PMI. It was great to meet with key players to understand how we can make PMI successful.

As part of the announcement, drchrono committed to enabling and supporting Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). FHIR is an Application Programming Interface (API) for exchanging electronic health records. The standard was created by the Health Level Seven International (HL7) health-care standards organization. The FHIR API will work in tandem with our existing medical API. We have alway supported an “open the data” API culture, allowing developers to build on our platform, allowing them to build in amazing ways, enabling FHIR will allow the developer community and others an additional API option.

Taimur at HIMSS 2016 talking about FHIR and drchrono

As we make progress over the next coming weeks and months, we will talk about the ways we are making progress on the “Sync for Science” pilots. We are all excited at drchrono about PMI. Enabling open and connected medical records data to make better decisions for personalized healthcare only makes sense. With huge amounts of data also coming from proteomics, genomics, and focusing on a total organism instead of just anatomy, enables new paths for prevention and treatment.

Some key resources about PMI:

Keep up to date with PMI on twitter as well.

Doctors have always recognized that every patient is unique, and doctors have always tried to tailor their treatments as best they can to individuals. You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type — that was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard? What if figuring out the right dose of medicine was as simple as taking our temperature?

~ President Obama, January 30, 2015

Watch the event here –

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

Daniel drives direction, brand vision, and business strategy for drchrono. Daniel’s focus has been in the technology space since 2001, as a software engineer and entrepreneur. Daniel holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

Healthcare Hacker Challenge: Clinical iFrame API

A great healthcare challenge for developers is to see what you can build on top of the drchrono iFrame API technology. Pick from this idea list. Be sure to make your iFrame webpage responsive for mobile screens also.

This is a quick explanation on how a developer can leverage our API and iFrames within drchrono

Below are examples of other developers placing technology into an iFrame.

One example, we now can place box.com‘s new DICOM viewer right into the medical record via an iFrame:

drchrono-medical-records-iframe-ehr-api-health-record

Also within the physicians inbox, a message can be placed from another developer via an iFrame, leveraging our API, to send a message from another app, below is an example again with box:

drchrono-medical-records-iframe-ehr-api-messages

And lastly a developer can now place an iFrame within the clinical note/documentation section, so while a physician is at the point of care with a patient, the doctor enter data the normal way using drchrono, but now also has the option to use another developer’s note taking tools. Below is an example from AgileMD ( https://www.agilemd.com/ ), AgileMD is the first partner to leverage this technology:

drchrono-medical-records-iframe-ehr-api-clinical-note

Here is a great video showing off what the AgileMD team has done, it really explains things well:

Janet Wager from Programmable Web wrote a great article talking about the launch of our Clinical EHR Medical Records iFrame API, take a look.

We are now getting around 4+ million API calls per month and this is growing fast. We have around 700 developers who have signed up to build on drchrono. The latest API documentation can be found here with the iFrame documentation – https://www.drchrono.com/api/.

Once you sign up for the drchrono API, be sure to email careers@drchrono.com to get expedited access, let them know you are a hackathon candidate!

Ok once you’re in and have access you can get access to your API account settings here – https://drchrono.com/api_keys/, also the docs can be found here – https://drchrono.com/api-docs/

Also please join the drchrono API community here to also ask questions – https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/drchrono-api

For single sign on you can get a login button here – https://www.drchrono.com/logos/

Once you complete your project, lets our team at know at careers@drchrono.com, send us a video of it in action and submit your project to GitHub in a public repository, we will review the code!

If the engineering team loves your code, we will bring you in for an in-person hackathon with us!

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono
Daniel drives direction, brand vision, and business strategy for drchrono. Daniel’s focus has been in the technology space since 2001, as a software engineer and entrepreneur. Daniel holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.

Top 7 Healthcare, Fitness and Medical APIs & SDKs

Top 7 Healthcare, Fitness and Medical API’s & SDK’s

There are a lot of innovative things happening in around healthcare, wearables, new insurance companies, ACOs, amazing new software and hardware; All with the goal of having a better healthcare experience.

The healthcare system in the United States and around the world can be better. At drchrono we care about making the technology fade into the background so patients and physicians can focus on what is important, quality of care and keep everyone around us healthy. So it is core for us to have the most state of the art innovative API we can. There are a number of companies that feel the same way.

Below are some of the most innovative companies I’ve seen around in healthcare tackling that one specific problem, allowing data to flow easily from doctor to patient, doctor to doctor and medical practices and institutions through an API (application programming interface). Having software talk, sending health focused data back and forth is critical, flowing from medical practice to hospital to family member. If you are thinking about leveraging an API to innovate – to push and pull healthcare data I recommend taking a look at the all of the APIs below –

(1) Box API

box Inc has a great API to store healthcare data. The company also has great security controls around metadata and data sharing. If you’re thinking about building something in and around HIPAA compliant storage, look at the box API.

https://developers.box.com/

(2) Human API

Human API allows access to data via their API. They have a Restful API and they connect into large healthcare network’s. One great example app that is using HumanAPI to connect healthcare networks is Glow, they are leveraging Human API so they don’t have to make those connection to some older health networks.

https://humanapi.co/

(3)FHIR Argonaut API Standard

The government is working on fixing the healthcare API issue. The main initiative around this is FHIR Argonaut. FHIR Argonaut is an up-and-coming API that is state-of-the-art and Restful, it is open source on GIT and backed by the government. The API is in its early stages but keep an eye out for this one.

https://hl7-fhir.github.io/argonauts.html

(4)BetterDoctor API

Better Doctor is a company that helps you find the right physician for you. They have an API. If you need to find out something about doctors. They allow partners to connect in to get information about a physician, location, contact info and more.

https://developer.betterdoctor.com/

(5)Doximity API

Doximity has an API for doctors, think of doximity as the LinkedIn for physicians. If you wanted to connect and build with some great information in and around doctors take a look at their API.

https://www.doximity.com/developers/home

(6)drchrono API and SDK

drchrono is an electronic health records company, that focuses on mobility on iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and responsive web. Wehave an API focused on medical records, practice management, scheduling and medical billing. With over 70k physicians, over 4+ million patients and over 500+ million in medical billing processed per year, we have the most modern medical records Restful API, leveraging Physician OAuth and Single Sign on.

https://www.drchrono.com/api/

(7) Apple HealthKit API and SDK

Apple has a great API and SDK called HealthKit, it allows a developer to build an app on iOS and push and pull data into and out of the app. Apple’s Health app is where you can view this information. Apple announced a bunch of new HealthKit metrics at WWDC 2015 — metrics that include UV exposure, how often you’re seated, reproductive health, and track a woman’s period.

https://developer.apple.com/healthkit/

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

Top 15 Health & Fitness iPhone Apps for 2015

There are a number of exceptional apps out this year, 2015 for iOS ( iPhone and iPad ) health and fitness. Below is a list of a few of my personal favorite apps that I think are unique and great to try.

Meditation & Yoga Apps

There are two great meditation apps out, Headspace and Smiling Mind.
Smiling Mind and Headspace both have iPhone apps and websites that a patient can access.

Both of these apps are great for stress relief for people who would like to meditate. Headspace gives ten free sessions then you need to pay for more sessions and Smiling Mind allows you to access all the meditation sessions for free.

Headspace was established in May 2010, by Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson. Puddicombe is a former Buddhist monk. Smiling Mind is a completely free app founded by Jane Martino October 2012.

Check out this great video from Andy:

Another great app for Yoga is Yoga Studio. It is an iPad and iPhone app only, they don’t have a website, but you won’t need it since the app is really focused on the mobility. The app is a one-time purchase, but it’s well worth it if you like doing Yoga. There are so many different sessions in the app that the price is an excellent deal. I highly recommend this app to anyone who’s looking to try Yoga or active in doing Yoga but looking for great instructional videos with step-by-step Yoga techniques and classes.

Workout Apps

Runtastic is another great app that I’ve used in the past for jogging sessions it tracks everything in and around running: miles, tracks times, best times and worse times and speeds.

There are other apps like Strava, I hear great things about it for biking as well as running.

Two very focused iPhone apps that are great are Sit Ups Pro and Squats Pro. Both of these apps are very simple and have one focus which makes it simple and easy to use. The apps don’t confuse you with too many options. You know exactly what they do.

Do you have 7 minutes? There is a whole movement around 7-minute workouts, here are a few:

In a short amount of time you can get a great workout in! These apps have great quick training sessions.

I also highly recommend this up though it is a little bit more intense and the meditation and yoga apps I recommended.

Sometimes you need to time a workout, one great app that I highly recommend is an app called Timer+, you can set a timer for how long you’re going to work out or howlongyou’re going to be jogging for, or whatever workout you’re doing. E.g.: Use Timer+ to time workout sessions say a 20-minute workout session or 30-minute workout session.

Weight and Calorie Apps

There are two great weight and calories apps. MyFitnessPal and LoseIt!. LoseIt! and MyFitnessPal are great for tracking your weight. LoseIt! also has a social network you can join for support. Both of the apps are free and have access via the web and iOS.

Health Journaling Apps

One of the best journaling apps for iOS and for Mac I’ve seen to document your day is an app called Day One. This app is iOS focused but also completely mac focused. I like this simple interface and how simplistic it is to journal daily from this app, it’s a great app for anyone who wants to journal daily about health and fitness progress.

Personal Health Record Apps

Some of the apps above are connected directly to Apple’s Health which means that the data that you enter into the apps from sync into Apple’s Health. You can also sync this data into your personal health record. onpatient is an app that can take this data and share it with your physician if you so choose. onpatient also allows you to message with you physician, if you have a question about a medical bill, schedule an appointment or need a prescription refill try onpatient.

So if you want to track something and also have it in your personal health record you can now do that … and you can share that with you doctor.

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

Healthcare Challenge – Open Source EHR Apps

With all of the different APIs that are coming out I haven’t seen a medical records company but drchrono that uses OAuth in a production environment and an elegant Restful API. We are also a company that really embraces innovation and would love to see the Open Source community look at what we have created and leverage our EHR to create Open Source healthcare case study apps and production ready apps on top of drchrono. There are many Open Source EHR apps out there, it would be exciting to see how they can work in tandem with what we have built.

drchrono ehr single sign-on oauth healthcare api

For any developers who are interested in building anything healthcare related, we now have a way to do it, simply signup for your drchrono account, then request Restful API access and we will turn the API for you!

definition: o·pen-source
denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified.

Build something Open Source on top of drchrono.

Here are a few interesting things that you could work on leveraging the API

Medical Pinterest like image viewing on the web of a patients history of images, including features like favorites
A fun birthday reminder system to tell patients it’s their birthday, e.g. Happy bday from Dr Smith!
Building out interesting reports on say prescriptions, ages,diabetes, heart issues and so on
Bed management assignment for hospitals and nursing homes
An amazing inventory management system for products a doctor sells
Specialty specific add-ons, for example glasses inventory charting tools for opthamologist
Build out an OAuth login sample in Java, Ruby or PHP (of course we prefer Python and Django)
Build a Doximity doctor to drchrono messaging app ( Both of us have APIs ) – this is a tough one!
Build out a HL7 Argonaut FHIR Standard plugin that is layered on top of the drchrono API
Uber for healthcare
Mental health apps
Nutritionist apps
Weight management apps
Health insurance management apps
Emotions apps, e.g. Paul Ekman facial recongition for recording emotions for therapists, psychology and psychiatry
Epilepsy tracker app

This is a great way to show us what you can do, put it on your resume, maintain and support if your passionate about healthcare and want to make something amazing. Get it running on your own servers and submit it to GitHub for other developers to help. You can sell support to doctors who want to run and use your software also!

Here are is one example project that is Open Source

A great methodology quote that Linus the creator of Linux once said-

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project. ~ Linus Torvalds

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

Wearable Conference, Medical and Health Records

Last week I had the honor of talking at the Wearable Tech Conference. It was great fun talking about where medical records will be in in the future. I go into a deep dive of session into some of the methodology around how we create what we create at drchrono and why we create what we create.

I asked the audience who had a smart phone, just about everyone at the conference raised their hand. I also asked how many people can access medical records on their phone, only one raised their hand. Our goal at drchrono is to enable everyone in the world be able to access medical data when they need it, we are making that a reality with the physicians who are using drchrono.

In this talk I go into a bit about the history of drchrono, wearables, how the cloud, iPhone and iPad are changing healthcare. I go into our we look for simple design, how we are always looking to optimize medical workflows and how disruptive being a freemium platform is within healthcare.

In the talk below I go into Apple HealthKit, ResearchKit, HIPAA Platforms and the Connected Home.

We have opened up our Healthcare API to allow other wearable companies, healthcare object companies and other medical software to leverage a medical record.

Some great quotes from other sources on wearables:

100 things are coming online every second. ~ Oracle, 2013

In 2005, there were 2.5 billion connected devices, most PCs, smartphones, tablets. By 2020, there will be over 30 billion connected devices, most not PCs, smartphones, tablets. ~ Gartner, 2013

One in six consumers own a wearable device. ~ Nielson

The market for buying smart phones is eclipsing the desktop and laptop.

This is the video presentation from the conference –

This is the slide presentation from the conference –

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchronoDaniel drives direction, brand vision, and business strategy for drchrono. Daniel’s focus has been in the technology space since 2001, as a software engineer and entrepreneur. Daniel holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.

Healthcare DevOps Challenge

The ability to consistently create and deploy reliable 
software to a platform that scales horizontally.
 ~ Jesse Robbins

What we are looking for

Looking to join a healthcare company with a mission to change the world? You just found the right place.

With over 4 million patients, 70 registered physicians our goal is to get medical records in the hands of patient and doctor around the world. Join us in making this change happen.

At drchrono we understand that DevOps is a cultural movement, with the goal of being to help people and functions work together to deliver more, better, and faster.

We are scaling fast and need amazing people with DevOps experience, more can be found here. Also read this, this is a great overview of what we are looking for. We are hiring for a number of roles, you can find a list of career descriptions here.

drchrono devops rack chronoplex hardware

The DevOps Challenge

Fill out the challenge below for us to get some insight into your skill set and where you would fit best.

The challenge questions are not timed. We want to see how you deal with problems, asses and analyze issues and scaling.

[wufoo username=”drchronoplatform” formhash=”porhjqi1vdbxcs” autoresize=”true” height=”4679″ header=”show” ssl=”true”]

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchronoDaniel drives direction, brand vision, and business strategy for drchrono. Daniel’s focus has been in the technology space since 2001, as a software engineer and entrepreneur. Daniel holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.

Healthcare Hacker Challenges

Healthcare Hacker Challenge #1

Child Immunization Schedule for Web

Are you looking to learn Django? This challenge is good for people who want to learn Django, it is more procedural work instead of creative work, but will get you thinking about web development. If you are coming in to do a drchrono Django Healthcare Hackathon, this one is great to show off the last day of the hackathon when we do a code review. You can show your thinking, how you built your app, how fast you learned Django and how you leveraged our healthcare Restful API.

Tech Stack to Use

Python, Django, JavaScript, Twitter BootStrapped and anything else you think would be needed.

Some fun tools you can use to hack away on the project you can use

Creative Tim’s Get Shit Done – CSS built off of BootStrapped
DigitalOcean – Super cheap servers, like $5 dollars per month cheap
IconFinder – Free Icons
Charts.js – Cool charting

Description

Generally medical doctors who see children, Pediatricians have a child immunization schedule or chart, on paper or software. The goal of your project is to build out a working immunization schedule for a doctor account leveraging the drchrono API. Be sure to signup for a free drchrono account here then request access to the API here. We would just need your username to turn on the API.

Once you complete the project you can email me a link to it working or shoot a screencast and post it on youtube. I would love to see it! You can find me at daniel[@]drchrono[dot]com.

Below are a few example child immunization charts, you can base your immunization schedule off of these below –

Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule

Two Hard Challenges To Think About

1. If you can think about how to administer in combinations that is a bonus!

Things get even more interesting when you administer immunizations with combinations. This is an example from eziz.org –

2. Doctors are always looking for the best way to administer shots, sometimes what is above doesn’t work. e.g.: say a baby doesn’t come into the doctor for the first two years of life to get immunizations, the above charts won’t work.

“Adults are just obsolete children.” ~Dr. Seuss

… if you finish the first part, there are also adult immunizations! More here on adult immunization schedules.

Other Healthcare Hacker Challenges

Here are two programming challenges that you can also work on as well, if you complete either of these, let me know! You can find me at daniel[@]drchrono[dot]com.

iPad Programmer Challenge this one is for people who are apply for iOS
Django Programmer Challenge this one is for people who are apply for a Django position

The drchrono iOS – Swift & Objective-C Healthcare Hackathon

healthcare hackers.

If you haven’t done so yet, please take the “drchrono hacker challenge” before moving forward. If you have already taken the challenge then read on. We are hiring for a number of roles, you can find a list of career descriptions here.

The Hacker Challenge

We have a lot of talented hackers take the “drchrono hacker challenge” in many different languages, there are a lot of programming languages. You can take the challenge in any language. We love all languages and each have their benefits, but we give preferential treatment to the languages most relevant to working at drchrono.

Our preferential languages to use in the challenge are: Objective-C, Python, Javascript, Erlang. Also if you know Swift, let us know, the challenge doesn’t support Swift.

Other languages frequently used for webdev are also impressive to use to use for the challenge: Ruby, Clojure, Go, Perl (to some degree), C/C++ (to some degree).

We don’t use these in drchrono, but will be impressed if you test well using them: Rust, OCaml, Haskell, Lisp, Lua, Racket, F#, D, Scala, PHP.

The languages least relevant to drchrono are: C#, VB.NET, Java.

Our reasoning: The healthcare hackathons consists of mainly Objective-C and Swift. So our preference is you take the drchrono hacker challenge in something related to what you will be doing here. You can give the challenge a try in the language you know best, then take the challenge again in Objective-C, that will impress us. We are ok with you learning and taking our challenge a few times if needed.

We’re looking for well-rounded web developers, ideally with experience in all layers of the stack.

If you really want to impress us, take our “Hard Hacker Challenge“.

The Cram Period

Once we call you in for a healthcare hackathon, you will have a chance to learn as much iOS — Objective-C and Swift as possible before coming in to impress us with your skills. (We also do Django / Python hackathons for people who are looking to join the front/backend team)

Swift is very different then Objective-C, but knowing either one of these is a skill we are looking for. Think of Swift as a more direct programming language then Objective-C.

iOS developers are blessed with infinite power from Apple’s Cocoa Touch framework and a thriving thrid-party open source ecosystem. The downside is that with great power comes great, uh, complexity. Being a successful iOS engineer is as much about mastering Apple technology as fighting with complexity. Cocoa Touch and the Objective-C developer community at large has established many conventions and patterns such as delegation, MVC, GCD, etc. Learn them. They will help you find clarity from complex structures. But good developers limit them with the goal of simplicity in mind, always. ~ Daniel D. from the engineering team.

engineering team at the chronoplex.

For those of you who don’t know Objective-C or Swift very well we recommend taking as much time as possible before coming in to learn as much iOS programming as you can. I can’t stress enough that knowing iOS programming will make it a successful hackathon for you.

I would recommend learning iOS Programming ~ 4-6 hours a week to really get prepared. Our stipulation is that when you come you are ready to hack away on an iOS idea.

Here are a couple of good resources to get you started, we develop for iOS 8 with a little iOS 7:

Apple Developer Documentation

About Objective-C
Introduction to Coding Guidelines for Cocoa
Cocoa Core Competencies / Model-View-Controller
App Programming Guide for iOS / About iOS App Architecture
Advanced Memory Management Programming Guide / About Memory Management
Development Center, Apples office API documentation
WWDC Videos, watch and learn, from Apple

Read These

Introduction to MVVM Pattern from objc.io
Grand Central Dispatch In-Depth from raywenderlich.com
C Programming Language, know this book front to back

Understand the Difference Between Objective-C & Other Languages

Advanced Concepts

Great Learning & Courses

Free: Developing iOS 7 Apps for iPhone and iPad from Stanford
Free: Developing Apps for iOS (SD) from Stanford
Paid Course: iOS Developer Nanodegree from Udacity
Paid Course: Intro to iOS App Development with Swift from Udacity
Paid Course: Online Video Courses from Udemy
Online Learning from from Lynda

For iOS Esoterica

Focus on making a small apps instead of just reading docs, show us what you built when you meet us in person!

Optional: Impress us by learning the drchrono Application Programming Interface API also if you have time, it isn’t required but it would be great to see what you think about it and what you can do with it. Work on one of these projects and show it off to us when you are at the chronoplex. Doing one of these projects is a great way to learn Django, learn about healthcare, leverage an API and will for sure impress us during your code review the last day of your healthcare hackathon … more about the hackathon below. Learn a bit about RESTfuls API with this tool.

The Healthcare Hackathon

The drchrono hackathon is 3 days, so you have only so much time here in the chronoplex to do something impressive.

definition: hack·a·thon
An event, typically lasting several days, in which people
meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.

Generally the 1st day is getting acclimated, meeting the team, getting use to the Mac, the development environment, and the software we load onto it for you. Not to mention learning a bit about Mountain View. We are a startup and there are about ~35 people on the team, say hi to people as they walk by! Let people know who you are, what you are working on. Talking to people will give you fun insight into our culture, team and some fun conversation.

It is ok to bring your own laptop to the hackathon, it is also ok to use Google, StackOverFlow and the like for the hackathon. Of course you will have the Internet as well while you are here.

who you will be meeting.

If you want to have an extra day to explore, just let us know and we will add an addition date onto your hotel room, on drchrono’s dime. You can look around and be a tourist for a day. Apple is about 30 minutes away, Y Combinator is about 15 minutes away and Google is next door to the chronoplex. San Francisco is just a CalTrain ride away. Just let Barbara our office manager know before you come out so we can book the extra day for you!

The “chronoplex” address –

328 Gibraltar Dr, Sunnyvale, CA, 94089

For a successful hackathon, we give you an idea, a code base to work, and you start hacking from there on the idea. Show us progress and take feedback to make refinements. Use your imagination and our suggestions to implement the idea. In order to do this, you’ll definitely have to know how to do a Objective-C and a little Swift, which typically involves coding in:

Objective-C and Swift ( not related to this hackathon )
Git + Bash (awesome if you know it but not essential)

The Code Review

At the end of the hackathon on the last day before you leave, we will do a code review to see how well you did on the task at hand, code quality and functionality. We review code to see how well you think on your feet, hacking away, and to see if the actual “thing” you built works and how much progress you made. We want to see what you’re thinking was, the issues you ran into and why you did what you did.

Also during the code review the team would love to see other projects you have worked on if you have them. We love looking at side projects, past work at other companies and any side apps. This helps us see how you program, tackle problems and see what you’re interested in.

The code review generally takes an hour.

The healthcare hackathon is the main determinant if we hire, the code and if we are a good culture fit.

Some insight from hackathon candidate and why it is worth going for the hackathon.

Our Culture

We see every developer we hire as artists, generally, the developers work when they are most productive, though being at the chronoplex is critical, we are a startup, we all need fast feedback loops and communication, as the platform is created, this applies across all teams from sales to customer success.

We try to minimize the meetings also to two per week with the developer team so you can focus on what is most important, building the platform.

Getting Hired

If the engineering team loves your code, we hit it off and you feel like drchrono is your future home … we will make you an offer fast within a matter of days. We are looking for the right people over just hiring anyone and seeing you in action hacking away and meeting in person speaks volumes on both sides.

After the healthcare hackathon, generally the decision is made in about 10 days if not before then, at this point we will give you an update on everything and if all goes well, we will make an offer!

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

Note: Thanks to the drchrono engineering team for reading drafts of this.

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchronoDaniel drives direction, brand vision, and business strategy for drchrono. Daniel’s focus has been in the technology space since 2001, as a software engineer and entrepreneur. Daniel holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.