My path to CodeRx

And what it has to do with flea markets

Ever since I was a little kid, I loved scouring garage sales, hardware stores, and flea markets for odds and ends that I would collect in boxes with the intention of building something greater than the sum of their parts. Springs, hinges, triggers, plastic cases, tubes, etc. I’ve always had an inventor’s spirit, but never had the tools or know-how to work with physical components to build inventions. But then again I was like 8 at the time and it was the 90s and I didn’t have access to the internet so I guess I should cut myself a break.

Anyway, at some point in my formative years I discovered QBasic in the DOS prompt of my grandma’s old PC (C:\>qbasic). Then I rode my physical bike to a physical library, and rented a physical book that taught me all about QBasic and more importantly about basic programming principals in general. Gradually, I started spending less time digging around in dusty flea market bins and more time scribbling workflow diagrams and pseudo code on big yellow legal pads - inventing digital things instead of physical.

At some point in physics class in high school, I told some random guy that I was torn between going to college for pharmacy or computer science, and he said that you can teach yourself whatever you need to know about computers, but you can’t just manifest a pharmacy license. So, off to pharmacy school I went. Six very academically challenging years later, I emerged with a PharmD. One of the first things I did after graduating was get another physical book - this time about PHP - and started learning how to build a webapp.

For several years after graduating, I was working as a retail pharmacist and in my free time building a webapp that aggregated local news from blogs / news outlets and ranked it based on social media reactions. After a while, I paused and asked myself why I (a pharmacist) was using my technical skills to build a journalism application - something I didn’t really care that much about. I shuttered my website and threw myself into learning more about health data standards, FHIR, Python, and SQL. This time, there wasn’t a good physical book that covered all that ground.

I went straight from retail pharmacy to a role as a e-prescribing software product owner at a major academic medical center (as one does) and learned a little about software development processes. Then, I got lucky and was part of a big-bang Epic EHR implementation and was immersed in the world of HealthIT as an EHR analyst. I started a little Slack group initially as a way to chat with people about HealthIT topics relating to EHRs, but found that my interests were really less about “turning the knobs of Epic” than they were about “inventing healthcare stuff”.

Obviously, my sweet spot was somewhere in the middle of pharmacy and computer science, so I “rebranded” my little Slack to CodeRx and started connecting with pharmacists like me who were way smarter and better than me at coding and data. I somehow convinced a few of them to compete in an HHS/ONC-sponsored contest to make synthetic medication data more realistic and we won first prize in 2021. However, in doing so, we discovered what a pain it was to work with open drug data - different file types, formatting, update schedules, terminologies, etc.

The friction we felt working with open drug data, combined with the withdrawal symptoms I felt from not having a big project to work on, led a smaller group of us to start working on a project that could make it much easier to work with open drug data. If you’ve been reading what I’ve been writing, you might already know that this led to the development of SageRx. I went from knowing very little about drug data to having a pretty comprehensive library of open drug data sources to work with in a couple of years.

With SageRx, I feel like I’m starting to again gather my boxes full of odds and ends that can be used to build things greater than the sum of their parts. This time, I’m curating parts from government organizations instead of flea markets and garage sales. Some recall data from FDA here, patient prescription medication surveys from AHRQ MEPS there, all historical NDCs from RxNorm here, WHO ATC classification mappings to product RXCUIs there. Now that my box of parts is starting to get full, what should we build with it? What problems can we solve with it? What research can be done with it? We have some ideas, but would love to know what you think.

If you want to be part of the rest of the story, please consider jumping into the CodeRx Slack - it’s nearly 900 people strong now! If you have any ideas for things to build or problems to solve or research to be done, please contact us - we hope to hear from you. In the meantime, I’ll continue down this path and see where it leads me.