About
I live in Plainfield, Illinois. I lead technology at Empower Health Services — Director of Information Services. Nineteen years in the gap between “we need this” and “that isn’t a product.” Ten years running a five-person shop that ships a national HIPAA wellness platform in-house.
Path
2007
Wellness Inc.
First real job. Desk was a rolling wire shopping cart. Binders of Palm Z22s with ePHI arrived all day. Hot-sync to CSV to floppy to jefferson.local. No Wi-Fi. Hand-me-down Dell. Apple hardware in healthcare was taboo. We did it anyway. Same mission now. Better tools.
2010
UnitedHealth Group / Optum
Wellness was acquired. The work-baby became UnitedHealth’s. I landed on the first Mac OS and mobile teams and shipped a thousand customized iOS devices a week. I applied for the mobile job that was already my work — backpack, sketches, the app running on the LAN. Crickets. Turned in the badge. Kept a Z22. Sometimes no is how you start your own.
2012
International Capital & Management Company
Walked in with no binder. Scope was the households, the operating companies, aviation, offices, retail, and the colo — every site that needed the next yes. I drew the maps. People, buildings, hardware. Stood up a shop that could run it: a ticket spine instead of walk-ups, one registrar, one identity under the parent. First hard yes was fiber around a private estate when the carrier still treated residential fiber as a favor. I left it running. That was the work.
2013
HAWA · Co-founder
Co-founded Health As We Age. HIPAA portals, nurse PHR, telehealth. Tiny team, real product, regulated environment. Scaled the other shop down to a bat-phone and built this one on thin cash. Quiet burnout. Then Gary Fine: “Available to chat with me?”
May 2016
Empower Health Services
Gary Fine. Five words. Build it from scratch. Day one was garage energy and a wire rack again. I stood this shop up without leaving the last one half-done. Ten years later I lead the shop that runs a national HIPAA wellness platform — biometric screenings, wearables, incentives, client reporting — five people, product in-house. Help Scout is the spine. JumpCloud holds the doors. We ship in days, not months. Security and QA are product, not a department we rent. I still say yes. I still ship. I still make yesterday’s job obsolete so this team can take the next one.
After the yes
First version of the job is you on every ticket. That version does not survive a second site. Second version is a map, a ticket spine, and a shop that can take the next yes without my phone. I built that at International Capital & Management Company. I built it again at Empower. A shop that still needs me on every push to demo is a shop I have not finished.
The shop
I do not scale by hiring. I scale by making five people dangerous — open work, a real cadence, and a boss who unblocks instead of collecting status. Coordination tax kills more products than missing features. This is the shop that runs a national HIPAA platform.
01
The product surface. What members and clients actually touch.
02
Identity, APIs, the path from demo to live.
03
Clinical truth. The reports a client will argue about.
04
Whatever has to exist by Monday and does not have a name yet.
05
The audit. MFA, CASA, the reason we still have Google scopes.
How I lead
01
Markdown over mystery. Tickets into GitHub. Monday Dev Collective with a master agenda, not standup theater. If the team can see the week, they can move it without me in the room.
02
I moved to a bullpen desk so I would stop being a closed door. Presence is a leadership tool. So is knowing when to take the call somewhere else.
03
Agents take the first pass. Two developers own the human gate. I take the aesthetic and the Friday demo. The shop gets faster because the floor is higher — not because I type more.
04
Tickets are data points across the environment. We close them as they appear. Vendor hours put on standby. Money we used to rent now pays for a full-time seat with benefits. Headcount is a last resort. Leverage is the job.
05
A shop that still needs me on every push to demo is a shop I have not finished. The next job is handing QC to someone I trust — and being able to sleep.
In the room
“WOW — Lee is instrumental in EVERYTHING EHS. He is a great ambassador moving us forward with technology in every aspect of the company. I like to think of him as our Chief Innovation Officer.”
“I doubt I will ever have a professional superior that is as knowledgeable, approachable, and patient as you are.”
How I work
01
I learned this as a private technical advisor when the request was fiber around an estate and the carrier said residential fiber did not exist. The tech often did not exist. The answer was still yes — and then the work to make it true.
02
Coordination tax kills more products than missing features. Five people who own the stack will outrun fifty who wait on a ticket queue. AI is a force multiplier. The secret sauce is still the team.
03
HIPAA, NIST, MFA, disaster recovery, dependency patches, first-pass deploy rates. Innovation that cannot survive an audit is a demo. I treat security and QA as product, not afterthought.
04
I would rather over-document in Markdown than become a mystery. If the team can see the work, they can move it. Asynchronous, decentralized collaboration is not a slogan. It is how we ship.
A small shop, run well, is not a compromise. High taste. A bias to ship. A team that can take the next yes without waiting on me.
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