Did you get paid for that? We use it at Balboa and I know Camp Pendelton uses it. I hope you got paid.
LOL no, funny story there -
Short version: My initial reward was a non-punitive letter of caution signed by the CO of the hospital. 8 years later the Navy gave me a meritorious service medal for it - actually signed by the same person, now a flag officer.
🙂 I now have both the medal citation and the reprimand for the same action framed together, as a nice way of fully encapsulating and commemorating the nature of government service.
Catch-22, like Idiocracy, are documentaries.
Long version: in 2014 I showed up at NMCP and they asked me to come up with a better scheduling system. Ideally at zero cost, of course. So I went to the IT department and asked them to help me with some intranet server space and other tech issues. They said, paraphrased, no, **** off, we don't have time for this, or any resources to give you, but knock yourself out if you want to figure it out yourself.
So I blew it off for a while, then got so frustrated with the scheduling system in place, that I wrote ASCHED on my own time. Initially we just used it at NMCP but as our staff moved to other places over the next few years, they wanted to use it at their current hospitals, so I set up instances on the server for them.
Our IT dept eventually noticed the project they didn't want to be part of was actually happening, and suddenly had "security concerns" about an "IT system" they had no control over. An IG investigation ensued and when everyone calmed down and stopped hyperventilating, we were allowed to continue using it, but I, my dept chair, and the IT dept chair were all awarded the aforementioned non-punitive letters of caution for our recklessness and poor judgement. Mine specifically noted my failure to consult IT prior to embarking on the project. You really can't make this stuff up.
Along with the approval to keep using our glorified calendar, came the requirement to comply with the DOD's risk management framework process. Which, to sum up, is an approximately 18-24 month review process that at one point was to involve a site visit by a team of engineers at a cost of $55,000 to us. This did not ever occur, in part because our IT department already had 32 other systems deemed more important, that were also delinquent on the RMF process. This was the second time they told me to **** off, mid RMF, after I'd painstakingly documented compliance with over 300 security controls mandated by NIST for low/low/low systems. Never did get the federal government stamp of approval, but it complies.
We also were required to move off an inexpensive commercial web host, and onto an expensive platform run by GSA (cloud.gov - which is really excellent).
I have no plans to ever commercialize it. In my previous life before medical school, in the pre dot-bomb era, I worked writing web software for a while.
One of the reasons I wound up in anesthesia was to minimize the time I was in contact with awake humans, aka customers. Getting back into the software industry isn't really on my agenda. I don't have time to do the marketing and tech support myself, and I don't have time to hire people to do it.
I still support the dozen or so DOD hospitals using it, but that doesn't take much time, as it's a mature/stable program after all these years. The only real update it's had in the last couple years was the surgical case import module that had to switch over from S3 to the new Genesis EMR.
I've thought about just releasing the code as freeware or shareware but even that would require a level of effort beyond my current free time.
