Yujin Kim
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4 min read
Building on Experience for Interoperability

Looking back on my six years as a software engineer, I realized that the lessons I learned along the way now guide me as I transition into a role as a interoperability engineer.

Motivation

As a software engineer, I applied my skills to a variety of areas. Starting in game development and web development, I most recently worked on data pipelines and messaging systems that connect IoT deployments. Data collection and scalable processing pipelines are an essential part of the current industry landscape.

My experience building data pipelines taught me how powerful well-structured data can be. I became curious about applying those same principles to a field where data directly informs human health decisions. That curiosity led me to start a master’s degree in epidemiology and analyze emergency department data to understand population-level health patterns.

While health data is very sensitive to handle, it also carries valuable information that can positively impact public health. I believe that healthcare data interoperability can directly impact public health. At the same time, my growing understanding of healthcare systems fuels my drive to make technology truly work for clinicians and patients. I felt that it would be important to understand how health data is collected and used effectively.


Graduate & Continuing Studies

For my master’s thesis, I analyzed German emergency department data, which was a large-scale healthcare dataset. The data was collected via FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), and we combined it with environmental data. From this, we could draw insights about pediatric asthma. I realized once again that data standardization and interoperability are crucial in healthcare.

I built a simple FHIR web application and an implementation guide as side projects.

Side Projects

  • FHIR Web App: Developed a web application for managing healthcare data using FHIR; implemented patient listing, detailed patient views (conditions & encounters), and creation of new patients with related records.

  • FHIR Implementation Guide: Developed FHIR profiles for asthma management, including Condition, Encounter, and Patient profiles with relevant clinical and demographic details.


Newly Developed Skills
  • Analyzing large-scale healthcare datasets
  • Public health domain knowledge
  • Healthcare interoperability and data exchange (HL7, FHIR)
  • Interface engine experience (Mirth Connect)

Full-Stack Web Development & Cloud Infrastructure

As a full-stack engineer, I developed web applications using React, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js. Furthermore, I built microservices and worked with Kubernetes for scalable and resilient infrastructures. I also created pipelines to collect logs and metrics with Fluentd, Prometheus, and Grafana.

I built real-time and asynchronous data pipelines using RabbitMQ, AMQP, and MQTT among IoT devices, which gave me hands-on experience in designing event-driven architectures and managing data flows.

Battle-tested Skills
  • DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure
  • Asynchronous messaging systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka)
  • Log monitoring and observability (prometheus, grafana, ELK stack, etc.)
  • Web development (frontend & backend)
  • RESTful API design and integration
  • SQL and NoSQL databases

Conclusion

After working in an industry that is focused on innovation and the next big thing, I now want to spend my time in an area that positively impacts people. I want to apply my knowledge of hands-on experience in healthcare data and dive deeper into health informatics and public health to implement and optimize FHIR standards. Using my interdisciplinary background in software engineering, data science, and epidemiology, I would like to help systems share data securely and flawlessly in healthcare, which would ultimately improve patient outcomes.