An interview with the StatCoder (I)

I am sure most of you would be familiar with StatCoder and their flagship products which make Evaluation & Management (E&M) coding easy for doctors. There are other free software from StatCoder which help in the management of hyperlipdemia, hypertension, cardiac disease and diabetes which I am also sure many of you also use. I for one find the Stat Cholesterol application very useful in my daily practice.

You might be wondering who is the StatCoder? Well wonder no more as we bring you an interview with the StatCoder himself, Andre Chen MD.

Andre Chen

PD: Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up being involved in Palm medical programming?

AC: I’m a full-time family practice physician at a multi-specialty group in Austin, TX. I was finishing up an executive MBA program at the U. of Texas in 1997 when a classmate showed me his new Palm Pilot. It was the first PDA that I felt I could carry around with me on a daily basis. More importantly, it had a fully-programmable architecture which meant that one could write programs for it with enough expertise. At the same time, I was trying to get my head around the new HCFA 1997 Evaluation & Management documentation rules (that we still use today) with its infamous counting of elements and complicated history, exam and medical decision-making algorithms simply to document and bill for an office visit. I had a checklist that I could use, however, I never could understand why I had to do all of the counting and scoring myself. That’s how STAT E&M Coder™ got started.

PD: Was it easy/difficult to start writing medical software? What obstacles did you face when you first started?

AC: It was slow-going at first since I have no formal training as a programmer. I had taken a couple of computer science courses in college but that pretty much stopped once I got into the premed and med-school curriculum. Fortunately, there are plenty of books you can buy that assume practically no prior knowledge of programming. You just have to start at the very beginning and have a lot of patience. My very first program was a day-one exercise that displayed “Hello World” on the screen of a Palm Pilot. That same program gradually expanded into STAT E&M Coder for Palm OS and, 11 years later, for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

PD: What is your programming platform of choice and the reasons for going with this?

AC: When you are programming for handheld devices, it’s always wise to choose the native platform for that device; the one that the pre-installed apps are developed on. Handhelds are always limited by memory, screen size, and ease-of use. You always want to optimize the experience for the user by getting the user to what they want as soon as possible and as easily as possible. For Palm OS devices, that means Codewarrior for Palm OS with code written in C. For iPhone the programming platform is Xcode provided by Apple and written in Objective C.

It’s tempting to consider using a platform, such as Java or a web applet that might be easier to write code for or that could be used by many different kinds of devices such as a PC, however, that means your software will not be optimized for any one device. For handheld users this means slower loading times, buttons that don’t look right, unnecessary inputs, and content that isn’t ideally formatted to their screens. Since the average duration of use of a handheld is 15 seconds or less (think about it) there is a huge difference in the user experience with suboptimal code. PDAs are becoming more connected to networks, however, this uses a lot of power and decreases battery life so users don’t like doing this constantly. Web programs will be mostly used on PCs not handhelds.

…to be continued (the next part deals with the iPhone and Andre’s thoughts on the new Palm WebOS)