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Health-tech · HIPAA · 2016 — present

Empower Health platform

Ten years at Empower Health Services. A national wellness platform — biometric screenings, wearables, incentives, and client reporting — run by a five-person technical team that builds the product in-house on Google Cloud.

Role
Director of Information Services
Stack
GCP · MongoDB Atlas · BigQuery · Cloud Run · Playwright
Status
In production

345k

Active members

5

Technical team

Weekly

Production cadence

Stack in production

We build it on GCP. Clinical feeds included.

Data plane

  • MongoDB Atlas
  • BigQuery
  • Cloud Storage
  • Cloud SQL

Compute

  • Cloud Run
  • Cloud Functions
  • App Engine
  • Compute Engine

Identity

  • Firebase Auth
  • Entra External ID
  • JumpCloud
  • Secret Manager

Clinical feeds

  • Quest APAL / HL7
  • LabCorp / Quest
  • Google Health API
  • Documo Fax

Quality & security

  • Playwright + Nx
  • CASA Tier 3
  • Qualys IaC
  • NIST CSF 2.0

Comms & ops

  • Twilio
  • SendGrid
  • Help Scout
  • Cloud Pub/Sub

The problem

I needed to scale a regulated national product without the enterprise tax. Off-the-shelf wellness suites meant vendor lock-in, HIPAA grey zones, and a cost structure that would have eaten the business. The work had to be custom, auditable, and owned.

What I did

  1. 01Architected the product in-house on Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas — application, data plane, analytics, identity, and comms under one roof. We build the product. No staff-aug on the product team. Cloud Run and Functions for compute, BigQuery for warehouse, Secret Manager and KMS for keys, Pub/Sub to keep services from knowing too much about each other.
  2. 02Migrated clinical and reporting logic out of front-end tools (Looker Studio page limits, brittle Data Studio charts) into backend SQL and Mongo streams so the numbers were true once. Service-over-service reporting replaced year-over-year pages that could not survive an audit.
  3. 03Ran the clinical integrations that actually move PHI: Quest APAL certification and HL7 result feeds, LabCorp and Quest offsite requisitions, a Document Center for snapshot consent, and the Fitbit-to-Google Health API migration.
  4. 04Built the operating system around the product: Help Scout into GitHub, weekly sprints, Playwright + Nx against immutable fixtures, AI agents for scaffolding, humans for review. Developers stopped centering divs and started owning quality gates.
  5. 05Held the security bar: MFA across the company, NIST-aligned policies, annual CASA / App Defense Alliance recertification, Qualys in the GitHub pipeline, and an AI acceptable-use policy with a Copilot carve-out that does not touch ePHI. Identity is moving from legacy SAML to Microsoft Entra External ID.

Outcome

A platform that serves hundreds of thousands of members, clears third-party security audits with praise, and still ships on a five-person team. Deployment moved from monthly to weekly, with a 20-minute path for urgent fixes. Gary Fine, the CEO, has called the role our Chief Innovation Officer. The title on paper is Director of Information Services. The job is both.