Overestimating nature in IQ
Looks like new research is indicating that schooling is more important than previously understood for life long intelligence levels.
Fred Trotter on Healthcare Data
Working to make patient data work harder for patients
Latest posts
Hacking on regulatory comment data
This weekend, I will be attending the civic tech DC hosted hackathon on regulatory data. Please join us! Civic Hack DC 2025 – Part 1: Making Public Comments Count · Luma Build open-source tools to unlock federal regulatory comment data with AI, data science, and policy expertise. 📅 Saturday,
OKR Warning Label
Objectives and Key Results, is one of the most effective focus tools that has ever left silicon valley. This is illustrated in the famous Measure What Matters book . But like any powerful tool, it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot. As we consider adopting OKRs (Objectives and Key
Healthcare Technology Strategy Lesson 7: Microservices vs Monoliths vs Monoliths of Microservices?
In software engineering, there’s a long-standing debate between monolithic architectures and microservices . Rather than taking a hard stance, it’s often more important to understand the context, motivations, and trade-offs involved in this discussion. Microservices as Technical Debt? I recently watched an insightful interview between
I am joining the CMS Digital Service Team
Fred Trotter is going to work at CMS Digital Services
Healthcare Technology Strategy Lesson 6: Where do we innovate?
We use the metaphor of a food truck business, vs other types of restaurants, in order to show some clarity on possible places to innovate.
Healthcare Technology Strategy Lesson 5: Intellectual Value instead of Intellectual Property
One way of thinking of the value of technology is to implicitly compare it to the value of real estate. But that framing fails pretty quickly. Ideas are not like land in most of the really important ways.
Healthcare Technology Strategy Lesson 4: Evolving From Known Good
The basis of all conservative technical strategy is “what can we make work for sure?”, which is the art of the “known-good” approach. The enemy of this approach is plans that “might” work.
Healthcare Technology Strategy Lesson 3: Managing Complexity and Technical Debt
This article discusses the fundamental problems of controlling complexity, and the concept of technical debt.
Healthcare Technology Strategy Lesson 2: Stacks and the philosophy of Unix
Whether you are familiar with the concepts of a Software Stack or not, this article should help you understand their strategic implications in healthcare technology.
Healthcare Technology Strategy Lesson 1: Begin with Patient Safety
This article details how CareSet adopted the principles of Patient Safety to its data processing efforts. Including the admission of major mistakes when they happen.
Healthcare Technology Approach and Strategy: A Summary
What I have learned developing and executing the technology strategy at CareSet, where I was the founding CTO.
One-on-Ones Might Be Making Your Team Worse, Not Better
I want to talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while: The way people treat one-on-one meetings like some kind of magic management cure. I suspect a placebo effect . You know how a placebo pill can make you feel like you’re getting
Moving to Ghost and a "login to read" model
I have been writing on this blog for years. Some of my best and worst ideas are memorialized here, and for years I have thought that I should go through and refine these ideas. My writing was available for free for people. In the area of AI vacuum cleaners, sucking
Cascading Configuration Design Pattern
I have not been able to find simple plain-language descriptions of what the Cascading Configuration Design Pattern is. And really not that many complicated descriptions either. Basically, this pattern is used to simplify very complicated configuration problems, by simplifying what would be a matrix of configuration decisions into a