Current Thinking

Posted on by Eugene Lee

Lately I have had a lot of things to think about.

First of all, I’ve been thinking about my career. When I first joined Microsoft, I thought it would make sense to change teams every 2~3 years or so to diversify my experience. And I did just that when I joined the Health Solutions Group (HSG) after spending over two and a half years in Office. So the question is, now that I have worked with the HSG for about three years, do I change teams again?

I have concluded that I would not. The problems that I am working on right now is very different from the problems that I worked on two or three years ago. And more importantly they’re very interesting and exciting problems. I also recognize that there’s a ton of potential in the health space. So I think that I can really develop myself further without growing complacent by staying in HSG.

Speaking of the problems that I am working on, I am thinking about ways to improve the care of ambulatory patients with chronic diseases. The problem is that people with diseases such as diabetes, CHF, CAD, etc. take up significant resources in hospitals. But with proper care management and preventive measures, there’s a lot of potential to reduce costs and also improve the overall quality of life of those patients. Hospitals are already starting to do that. But with software innovation, it is possible to proactively identify and triage patients with chronic diseases and enable case managers and the patients themselves to manage the conditions in a more automatic and systematic way. The more we can push patients away from acute care to guided disease management or self prevention, the better.

Aside from work, I have been reading a lot more. Typically I read a lot of novels toward the end of the year and then switch to non-fiction in the beginning of a new year. This year I started reading up on investing. Although I do not have much to share, I have made some non-trival changes to my (lack of) investment strategies. It took more work than I anticipated to implement the changes, but I feel good about making more informed decisions. I hope to be able to write about positive learnings from that venture.

I have also started planning trips with friends. After my trip to Turkey last year, I decided to travel at least once a year and I most certainly intend to make good on that commitment. There are a lot of places to go to, and organizing trips for any sizeable group of people is not an easy thing to do. But I think the headache is definitely worth it.

There’s a lot more that I think about, of course. But I must admit that all I really do is think about that special someone :)

Spring Hill

Posted on by Eugene Lee

Spring Hill is a trendy restaurant located in West Seattle’s Junction. The restaurant is getting a lot of attention from the press, so I made the long trip from the east side to West Seattle to check it out.

Unless you know where to look, Spring Hill is a little difficult to find. There is only a small, minimalist sign to look for that is easy to miss. However, the interior offers a lot more to look at. I know this is a subjective matter, but I think that Spring Hill has one of the best interiors in Seattle. The overall look and feel of the restaurant is simplistic, yet a lot of attention and care was given to every piece of furniture. In fact, I’m quite sure the booth seat that I sat on was custom designed and made for the restaurant. It is quite a trendy place – perfect to bring a date.

I also like the open kitchen. Everything is clean and orderly. And looking at the chefs and cooks work makes for good conversation topics. Next to the kitchen is a bar which looks quite nice but I haven’t tried it.

The service is, no doubt, very nice. You are greeted warmly and led to your seat. They check your coat and ease you in. Everything from ordering to receiving your food is done very professionally and there are no complaints there. We ordered several dishes and three servers brought them out and placed them on the table simultaneously. One of my friends ordered a dish late, and they were able to accommodate it without a hitch. I must note that they didn’t fill my water glass as frequently as I’d like, but nobody does. (It is a pet peeve of mine.)

On to the food. Overall, the presentation of the dishes is nice. As far as I can tell (as an untrained person), a lot of thinking went into the preparation of each dish. However, given the interior and presentation of food, I think the taste could’ve been better.

On one visit, I ordered their duck’s eggs benedict and my companion ordered a quiche. The portion was a lot larger than what I expected. I enjoyed my duck’s eggs benedict but it didn’t blow me away.

For dinner, the portion sizes are a lot smaller. I think my favorite dish was their crispy veal sweetbreads. It literally melts in your mouth. It’s a nicely portioned appetizer for several people.

I had high hopes for the 1/2 beef burger. However, I found the patty to be way too salty. It’s a shame, really. If they went easy on the salt it would have been the perfect burger.

I also found the beef steak hot & cold dish to be disappointing. I’ve taken a liking to raw meat (which is an acquired taste, I suppose). But the cold beef given to me was underwhelming. I kept thinking about the cheap raw meat dishes I can easily find in Korea.

The wood grilled boudin blanc sausage was pretty good. Although… it’s really just a piece of sausage. If I were to return to Spring Hill, I’m not quite sure what I would want to get next. Perhaps I would order the 1/2 burger again and ask if they can go easy on the salt (unless it’s prepped that way).

Given that I only had one dinner at Spring Hill, I am certainly willing to go back again to give them another chance. The service and interior is too good, in my opinion, to outright reject them. Perhaps they had a bad night but I just did not find their food very enticing. I’ll post an update when I get to try them out again.

Super Freakonomics

Posted on by Eugene Lee

I picked up and read Super Freakonomics on my flight to Korea. If you read and enjoyed Freakonomics, I think there’s a good chance you will like the sequel as well. I certainly did.

While reading through the book, I was delighted to find good coverage on Microsoft Amalaga in the chapter “Why Should Suicide Bombers Buy Life Insurance” and elsewhere. There was even mention on the implementation at the Mayo Clinic. If you haven’t read the book yet please check it out.

H1N1 Response Center

Posted on by Eugene Lee

The H1N1 Response Center is an self-assessment application that we built in response to user concerns over H1N1 flu (Swine Flu). You can learn whether you have H1N1 symptoms and what steps you can take. There are also useful resources on H1N1 so please check it out.

From a technical standpoint, the H1N1 Response Center is a HealthVault application that was radpily developed and deployed onto the Windows Azure platform. I, unfortunately, was not part of the team that built it, but it was cool to watch the application go from conception to final deployment in such a short time.

Amalga Unified Intelligence System

Posted on by Eugene Lee

Hospitals use disparate systems to manage different health information. Health care workers may have to go to one system to look up registration and then go to another to look up lab work. It is not uncommon for hospitals to have 15 or more of such systems running. It should come as no surprise that managing medical information requires a lot of resources.

Amalga Unified Intelligence System 2009 (Amalga UIS) is an enterprise system designed to aggregate data from these disparate hospital systems. It listens to HL7 and other data formats across the hospital network and aggregates them in its database. With Amalga UIS, health care workers no longer have to go through multiple systems. They can now create customized views and software that interact with the aggregated data in one, consistent location.

As you can imagine, there’s huge potential in aggregating data from disparate hospital systems. For instance, it is possible to automatically flag patients that are due for new vaccines as opposed to a care manager manually going through files. Even in this simple, obvious example, a lot of time money can be saved. The potential is endless.

So far I have worked exclusively on consumer health solutions, including the Mayo Clinic Health Manager. But recently I have switched gears to work on implementing Amalga UIS in a world class hospital. I will be taking on an engineering lead role which brings a whole new set of challenges that I am not accustomed to. But I very much look forward to it.

Mayo Clinic Health Manager

Posted on by Eugene Lee

In my previous post, I briefly outlined what we do at the Health Solutions Group (HSG) at Microsoft. There, I also explained how our consumer solutions are built on the HealthVault platform.

Mayo Clinic Health Manager is an online tool that we built on the HealthVault platform that helps you organize health information for you and your family. And while it can’t replace the care you receive from a physician or other health care provider, it can provide personalized health guidance for every member of your family based on their specific life stage and health status. It’s free; so go check it out.

I contributed to the design and implementation of two main components of the application.

At the heart of Mayo Clinic Health Manager is a system that analyzes your health record data and provides medical guidelines and recommendations. These guidelines are based on clinical rules that the Mayo Clinic provides. So we needed to design a recommendation engine that can handle running regularly updated clinical rules against health record data.

Another area that I focused on was in data interoperability. One of the challenges of running clinical rules against health data is that the data can come from a variety of sources. Different sources tend to encode data in different ways. For instance, one system might represent that the user has “Diabetes Mellitus” with a SNOMED CT code whereas another system might use ICD-9. Yet other systems might just have a textual description, voice dictation, or scanned records. So there needs to be a system to normalize data before running clinical rules on them.

While the Mayo Clinic Health Manager operates on data from a variety of sources, it also acts as a source of data. The application provides a variety of editors that the user can use to enter or modify health data. So we also needed to take care in ensuring that data entered through the Mayo Clinic Health Manager could be used by other applications in the HealthVault ecosystem.

I cannot discuss the details of our system, but we have spent a lot of time on creating an accurate recommendation engine. We also took care of promoting data interoperability within the HealthVault ecosystem. There’s a lot more we have planned, and I look forward to the improvements to come.

Health Solutions Group

Posted on by Eugene Lee

Whenever I mention that I work for the Health Solutions Group (HSG) at Microsoft, I find that quite q few people are surprised that our group even exists within the company. But once I break the news, most people are excited to learn about what we do at HSG. So for those of you who are interested, I would like to spend a little time talking about what we do at HSG, and also what I do at Microsoft :).

There are, in large, two solutions that we focus on at HSG. The first is the consumer piece, where enable people to manage their own health data through various applications (web pages), devices, and hospital portals built on top of the HealthVault platform. And the second is the enterprise piece, where we provide software solutions for hospitals.

At the very heart of our consumer solution lies HealthVault. In the simplest terms, HealthVault is a secure, online repository where you can store your health information. Consumers can use HealthVault to store copies of their health records obtained from providers, plans and pharmacies; upload information from health and fitness devices; share information with healthcare providers; and access online products and services. Note that we are not the only ones building software and devices for HealthVault. There are already quite a few partners who have! Please check out this video on HealthVault to get a better feel.

In my next post, I will talk about the Mayo Clinic Health Manager, which is an application that we built on top of HealthVault.

Pro Club Evacuation

Posted on by Eugene Lee

I was running hard at the Pro Club when an employee walked up to me. At first I thought my towel dropped to the floor. Sometimes that happens. But after intently listening to her walkie, she casually told me that the entire gym was being evacuated. I looked around and indeed found that everybody was leaving. And only then did I notice that the alarms were ringing.

I thought I might as well continue my work out by running out the gym. But there was no real sense of urgency. So instead I ran back to my locker and collected my belongings. I am glad that I did.

When I finally got outside, there were people who literally just ran out of the shower. Everybody was just standing outside of the building, presumably waiting for instructions. I also saw two firetrucks coming into the parking lot. It was time to make an exit; I promptly found my car and left.

I wonder if I’ll get to experience that again.

Chantanee

Posted on by Eugene Lee

I have several foodie friends, including a chef and owner of a restaurant, whose passion is in eating and cooking. There was a point in time when I could not understand why they would spend so much time talking about food. But after several years, I have come to share in their interest. I don’t cook much (although I am known to make a decent red wine reduction sauce) but I do like to dine out. So while I sort out what I exactly want to write about in this blog, I’ll review a few restaurants in the Northwest.

Actually, there are quite a few places to write about: Tilth, La Spiga, Ray’s Boathouse, Brasa, ROTI, Flo, and Dhalia Lounge are just a handful that immediately come to mind. But I do not wish to write outdated reviews stitched together from distant memories. Instead, I will write about restaurants as I eat out. This brings us to the first restaurant, Chantanee.

Chantanee is an upscale Thai restaurant in downtown Bellevue. It is located on the first floor of the Key Center (108th and 6th). On weekends or on weekdays after 5pm you can park at the Key Center parking lot and get your ticket validated. However, if you decide to come in for lunch on weekdays I suggest that you park in the Barnes & Noble lot on 110th. The nice folks at Barnes & Noble will give you parking validation for two hours, no questions asked. If you need more time, you can get an additional hour at Starbucks in exchange for a latte.

Back to the restaurant: it is an upscale Thai restaurant with an excellent, modern interior. The staff is very friendly and attentive. I have been to Chantanee twice (all within a week!) and in both visits found the place busy. Not to worry though; there are plenty of seats. I was always greeted and seated immediately upon my arrival. There were times when I felt they’re a little too attentive, however. Being asked whether the food is to my liking gets a little annoying after the second time.

The food definitely matches the interior and service. Every plate is clean and presented well. I don’t remember the last time I was served Thai food and really took my time studying and enjoying the plate before eating. And of course, the taste does not fall short of presentation.

If you enjoy eating meat, I would recommend their wok fried dishes. I tried their crispy garlic chicken which is essentially boneless chicken married with out-of-the-world garlic sauce. The dish only comes in family size ($14), which is basically dinner portion for a hungry adult. I also tried their Tom Kha soup, which is served on a porcelein pot and burner to keep it warm. Sharing a wok fried dish and a soup between two works well.

If you happen to go to Chantanee at lunch time, I would also recommend that you try their combo menu. You get Phad Thai, two crispy wantons, and rice along with your choice of several dishes. It’s a nice sampling of what they have to offer for $10.

On a side note, I did not know about Chantanee until about a week ago. This is because whenever I crave for Thai food around Bellevue, I always go to King & I without second thought. Their food is excellent, but my primary reason for going is because of the Passport Card discounts that I get. You can’t beat buy-one-get-one-free offers. But I do think Chantanee’s pricing is pretty competitive especially given the quality of food and service that you get. I highly recommend that everybody try it out.

Introductions

Posted on by Eugene Lee

Welcome to my little corner on the web. Here you will find an assortment of thoughts, photos, projects and whatnot that I may find interesting at one point in time.

For those of you who do not know me already, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eugene Lee. I am a senior software development engineer working for Microsoft. Previously I worked on Microsoft 2003 and Microsoft Office 2007. After that I decided to take on new challenges and joined the Health Solutions Group (HSG) where I have been working since.

In the past few years, I worked on both consumer and enterprise health solutions. Most notably I have worked closely with the Mayo Clinic on various projects including their hospital deployment of Amalga UIS. My current focus is on building effective solutions to ingest medical data from various sources. I will occasionally write about life as a developer and some of the technologies that I work on.

Prior to joining Microsoft, I have studied computer graphics at Cornell. I was a teaching assistant for a graduate level advanced rendering class. I also co-authored a paper on hardware based interactive rendering and won first place in the Intel Student Research Contestfor the work. While my current line of work does not involve graphics at all, I do try to keep up with the latest research and sometimes implement rendering algorithms. Every once in a while I will write about the ray tracer that I am working on or computer graphics in general.

Outside of work, I will write about the things that I enjoy doing: hiking, photography, gadgets, and food. For those that are interested, I keep a Facebook page as well as a Flickr gallery.

NOTE: Please note that I do not represent Microsoft or the Health Solutions Group in any way through this blog. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own.