From Apprentice to Artist: 19 Years Inside Healthcare Systems
I started at Kaiser at 19 as a pharmacy tech. I didn’t know I was beginning a 19-year apprenticeship in healthcare systems. Like artists who study under masters for a decade before creating their own work, I’ve studied under the ‘master’ that is Kaiser and Epic.
I’ve moved through five roles—not because I couldn’t commit, but because I was learning. Pharmacy taught me medication workflows. Coding taught me documentation. HIM taught me data. Each was a brushstroke in understanding the complete picture.
Now, after 19 years, I’m ready to create. Not prescriptions or codes or reports—but the systems themselves. I’m ready to design the tools I wish I’d had all along.”
When I went to pharmacy tech school I chose Pharmacy because I said quite literally “I want a job that will allow me to interact with as many people inside the hospital as possible so that I can learn what everyone is doing and figure out where I want to be.” That was my goal and so you can imagine my heartbreak when, as I tried navigating up through the health information venue within hospitals, I was getting turned down left and right. Even though I had a degree that everyone said was the degree you would need to break into management, I had no management experience, A bachelor’s degree that I had received as magna cum laude, and 18 years within Healthcare and I was being told no for every single job that I applied to. People will tell you spiritually that rejections are reroutes and protection and pauses are meant to send you in a different direction. Well, it took a really long time for me to realize that I was looking at hospitals from the wrong side of the wall. If I want to change things – which you could ask any one of my supervisors of the past and they would tell you that I was so outspoken because I really deep down they could see wanted to change things – I was going to have to leave hospitals to make those changes happen and to get acceptance for who I was and what my two decades had grown me to become.
After 19 years moving through pharmacy, HIM, and coding—living the transition from paper charts to AI—I bring a perspective that’s genuinely rare. Clinical operations, health information management, patient experience, and now academic rigor in both informatics and compliance.
Who else has this combination?
Nobody.
And that’s exactly what healthtech needs: someone who’s lived the entire system from every angle.
So yes, I’m pivoting from coding to product design. But I’m bringing 19 years of embodied expertise that spans clinical care, health information management, and now advanced study in both informatics and compliance.
Who else is like me? Nobody.
And that’s precisely the point.