Team Member Highlight: Isaac Hernandez
Tell us a bit about yourself. (Who are you? Where are you from? Hobbies?)
Isaac: Hi everyone! My name is Isaac Hernandez. I am from Inglewood, California. I love attending hip-hop, R&B, and EDM concerts. I enjoy drinking tequila and mezcal. Soccer and basketball are my favorite sports. (Go Cruz Azul, LAFC and the Lakers!) 10 years ago I moved to upstate New York to attend Hamilton College where I fell in love with programming. After college, I moved back to Los Angeles and started working as a Full-Stack Rails Developer for Property Matrix. Then I took a break to drive across the country and backpack in Latin America for a bit before finally landing at Episource.
What team are you a part of here at Episource, and what is your role on this team?
Isaac: I am a Full-Stack Developer on the epiAnalyst (Medicare) team. Our application helps Healthcare Providers identify and chase Risk Adjustment opportunities in order to maximize the amount CMS reimburses them for taking on risky patients. As a Full-Stack Developer I am a jack-of-all-trades and have worked on user interface, backend API, database and dev-ops problems. I’ve even helped the Data Engineering team with some ETL problems. My role can be summarized as: I design and develop software solutions to any problems or requests that come up for epiAnalyst.
What does a typical work day look like for you?
Isaac: A typical workday for me starts with a progress report at the epiAnalyst team’s daily standup. Then I get to working on the JIRA stories that are assigned to me. Our team is very collaborative and we’re always making sure everyone has all the information they need to get the job done, so on a typical workday I also go back and forth with a Product Manager and/or Software Developer on my team about business logic or a technical implementation.
Tell us about an Episource project you’ve been involved in that you are particularly proud of.
Isaac: I am going to cheat and say 2. I worked on Clinical Procedure Suspecting, a feature for generating HCC suspects from claims’ procedure codes. I also worked on Suspect Sources, a feature for keeping track of every reason we suspect an HCC as opposed to just the highest confidence reason.
The reason I am grouping them together is because I am proud of them for the same reason: I designed and implemented the entire solution for these features. This meant handling the ingestion of the data in our pipeline using SQLServer (and later translating it to Scala & SparkSQL), transforming the data in PostgreSQL for optimal querying speeds in epiAnalysts’s advanced search feature, implementing the backend API logic in JavaScript (Node.js/Express), implementing automated tests with Mocha, and implementing the UI sections in HTML, CSS and embedded JavaScript. Usually when working on a project it will be split up and the different domains are assigned amongst several developers, but for these features I really went Full-Stack and took responsibility for every facet of them. They are my babies.
Is there a book or movie that has affected your outlook on life and how?
Isaac: In High School I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and the book is great but there was one passage in particular that has really stuck with me throughout years. Somewhere in the middle of the story she mentions how her life is like a fig tree. The fig tree branches out and some of those branches go high and have wonderful fruit hanging while others bend down and have their fruit fall and decompose on the ground. The tree represents the realm of possibilities, Each branch is a different possible life she could live, and her decisions will dictate which branch her life becomes. Sometimes I find myself thinking about my life as a fig tree and I weigh certain options in the hopes that the life I lead is a branch that goes upwards with nice, juicy figs on it.
