Henry Ford Hospital 1977:

I was a lab technician (FORTRAN programmer) for a cardiac research group. One consideration of running medical research is the cost of doing the experiments. Both the cost of the materials to run the experiment and the "cost" of a donated current organ used in experiments must be considered. Limiting the loss of these assets during an experiment that goes terribly wrong will not only save the assets it will reduce the time needed to set up another experiment. If we could in real time project our best guess of the experiments outcome we would know when to stop the experiment. So I wrote a probability program that used the real time data to numerically integrate the probability interregnal to provide this solution. This is considerably different then calculating the probability in "closed form" using all the data after the experiment. The numerical approach gives a close solution that will have errors due to the method used and the "closed form" method is a "more exact" approach containing computer introduced errors only. In medical research reports we use the "closed form" technique as it is an almost exact answer, a better answer.

There was such a wait between research projects that I found a position at Uniroyal Tire Company. They offered me a position to work with the Engineering Group writing PL1 or as a COBOL trainee in the business group. (There was about 260 applicants interviewing for these two positions that day) I took the new language COBOL to round out my experience.

The Research group at Ford Hospital found a Ph.D. to take my position.

Henry Ford Hospital 1978 - 1981:

I was assigned the responsibility and authority for all aspects of several computer systems at HFH (Henry Ford Hospital) and HAP (Health Alliance Plan) Insurance Systems. These systems included Medical Records System, Utilization Review System, Vascular Research System and HAP Insurance System. I Trained and guided a programmer to provide additional support for HAP. Occasionally I provide technical advice and support for the billing system people when they were in need. In VM/CMS I wrote exec procedures to convert all the HFH computer systems from IBM "HFH"DOS to VSE to MVS as specified by management. These systems where then successfully converted and tested all in a couple of months. I continually provided innovative improvements to keep the work process under control. For example when reviewing HAP's operations it appeared that they were paying claims that were for a patient's same stay and procedure with different names, addresses etc. Solutions were provided to mediate these kinds of duplicate and near duplicate payments and other risks.

When I was applying for this position they gave me a program to fix. It was a small COBOL program with about 6 pages of errors. I was to fix the errors and run the program. After about 20 minutes and one compile I was done, best time ever.

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