Open to opportunity
I am skilled in backup/disaster recovery systems installation, integration, and administration using EMC based hardware and software solutions. I am interested in doing this type of work remotely with some light travel if needed. If you have an opportunity like this for a highly skilled dependable hard working engineer please contact me at david@daviddiggs.net
New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, NC 2011 - Present
I worked for Mckesson Corporation for eighteen years. While I was working in the remote hosting team for McKesson the company made the business decision to sunset most of the products that I was working with. I was moved to the McKesson outsourcing team. I really liked McKesson and had a lot of history with the company. I had been through seven major layoff and three minor ones. I decided the company was going in a direction that I no longer fit with my personal goals.
I had friends working at New Hanover Regional Medical Center and I had also done some technical work for New Hanover over the last ten years while working with McKesson. New Hanover made the decision to drop McKesson as their primary hospital vendor and go to Epic. I thought it would be a good place to pick up some Epic experience and move to the coast of North Carolina.
I wanted to do something entirely different, to reinvent myself. I needed to be able to use most of my skills I had developed working with hospital systems. However I thought it would be best to move into a field that was not so dependent on a specific application, vendor or business.
I interviewed with New Hanover in October of 2011. I was offered the position of Enterprise Backup and Disaster Recovery Engineer and started work in November. The hospital knew my reputation for being a dedicated engineer and having a very good work ethic. New Hanover is a EMC shop but I had no experience with EMC backup products. New Hanover hired me and sent me to multiple EMC classes to obtain the training I needed to be the administrator for all the backup systems used by the hospital. EMC is an industry leader in the field of backup and disaster recovery hardware and software. I have taken classes for Networker, DataDomain, Avamar, Backup and Recovery Manager, and Data Protection Advisor (DPA).
The hospital hired a contractor to come in and install and build the initial backup environment before I got there so by the time I was hired the contractor was gone. At first I did not know how bad the system build was. After only working a few months the hospital went live with the new Epic systems and the backup environment started crashing daily. I worked a lot of late nights and weekends to figure out why our brand new multimillion dollar backup systems were crashing. It turned out to be a severe case of initially undersizing the backup systems and a really bad architecture design by the contractor they hired.
In my first two years of working for New Hanover we have replaced every single piece of EMC backup hardware and upgraded all the software and completed re-architected the entire backup/disaster recovery environment. I am very happy to say that our backup systems are running very well and the average daily backup success rate is 99.5%. This is an accomplishment that I am very proud of.
Microsoft Window Server Patching
I volunteered to design and build a Windows Patching program. I used IBM BigFix as the patching system. We are in the process of implementing Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).
Data Protection Advisor (DPA) reporting
After we upgraded the backup hardware and software I had more time to do other interesting things. One thing that I am very proud of are the custom reports I created for our management team using EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA). I produce daily, weekly, and monthly reports for the success rate of our backup systems. These have been very useful in justifying the cost of all the upgrades. It is hard to argue cost when you go from 50% successful to 99.5% successful.
McKesson 1991 - 1995 and 1997 - 2011
My IT career began with American Express Healthcare. I went to work for American Express Health care systems in 1991 right out of CPT (Computer Programmer Training). My first assignment was to move to St. Louis, MO for six months to learn a programming language call "CYBOS” which was a derivative of the programming language “ FORTH ". I learned this language so I could make year 2000 code updates, government required updates, software bugs fixes, and do maintenance programming for a product known as IHS. I worked primarily as a billing system maintenance programmer but also worked on the IHS ADT system.
While I was in St. Louis, MO. American Express Healthcare split off from the parent company American Express to form a new company called First Data. The work I was doing did not change, just the name of the company. I moved back to NC in April of 1992 and began working on the IHS system as a programmer/analyst.
I worked about eighteen months and was transferred with a small group of people to a product called PCM. This was a COBOL based hospital pharmacy application that ran on Tandem hardware. I worked on year 2000 code updates, government required updates, software bugs fixes, and maintenance programming for the PCM pharmacy application.
I stayed with the PCM product until 1995 when First Data merged with HBOC. This was about the time the company was starting to outsource a lot of programmer jobs. I started to get concerned because with each merger there were layoffs.
I quit HBOC and went to work for Food Lion as a COBOL programmer/analyst. This job change was partly so I could work closer to home. I was commuting about 45 miles to work one way. I only stayed at Food Lion about a year and then went to work at Lexington Memorial Hospital as an interface programmer/analyst.
I stayed at Lexington Memorial for about a year and decided that I liked working for HBOC more and went back in 1997. My hire date was adjusted back to 1992 so that is why my time with McKesson is on my resume as 18 years but I had two different jobs during the same time period. I just wanted to make that clear because it looks confusing on my resume. The company was called McKesson-HBOC when I went back the second time but eventually the HBOC part of the name was dropped and the company became known as McKesson.
I have moved around a little within McKesson to try round out my skill set. I continuously reinvented myself. I worked on the STAR product as a custom interface programmer. I felt that the coding language was interesting but archaic. Most of the application was over twenty years old. Everything in the STAR application is written in MUMPS, even the database. I did not feel that MUMPS programming skills would be very transferable outside of McKesson and I wanted to get into more current technology.
I transferred from the McKesson Charlotte, NC office to the Louisville, CO office in 1999 to work with the Horizon Clinicals product suite. This was a good move because it allowed me to work with a great group of people and learn a lot of new skills. I started in support as a systems support engineer. I worked with UNIX, Linux, Oracle, Java and a host of other things. I was promoted to supervisor for the systems team after about two years. I was the supervisor in the Systems team for about a year. I hold the Services Strategies support manager certification. I was offered a promotion to move to services so I took a job as Senior Technical Implementation Engineer (TIE) for HED/Adminrx in 2005.
In August of 2009 I left Horizon Clinicals services organization and went to work for the Remote Hosting / Managed services organization part of McKesson. I worked in the remote hosting team employed as a Senior Technical Implementation Engineer (TIE). I served as the technical lead for the complete remote hosting projects I worked on including all hardware, software, technical issues and events. Remote hosting was a new business unit for McKesson where the hardware and software are remotely hosted in a McKesson data center. As the technical lead on these projects I worked with multiple technologies layers such as UNIX, Linux, Windows, Oracle RAC, SAN, VMware, backups, Citrix, Networking, and remote access issues. Remote hosting projects consist of multiple McKesson applications and hardware platforms.
In my career with Mckesson I worked in development, support, and services. I have a very good big picture understanding of hospital information systems. About half of my last eight years with McKesson was spent working from home. I have developed excellent time management skills.
My job consisted of installing overseeing all the technical aspects of a McKesson Remote Hosting project from start to finish. It sounds simple but in this position I would touch nearly every aspect of the entire hospital information system. It was a very interesting job and allowed me to work with multiple complex layers of technology and gain a lot of experience.
Working with McKesson was a great learning experience because technology is always changing. I had the opportunity to do a wide variety of technical jobs and learn a lot of great skills. In all I worked for McKesson for about eighteen years.
Lexington Memorial Hospital 10/96 - 10/97
I took a job as the interface manager. This was a very good job and I learned a lot while I was there. I managed all the data coming in and going out of all the various different systems. I used an interface engine similar to Cloverleaf. Working at Lexington Memorial was a good move for me because I learned a lot about how hospital information systems run from the hospital perspective. I think the year I spent working at Lexington Memorial made me a much better hospital systems programmer/analyst. I enjoyed the job but decided that I really liked working on the software vendor side and went back to work for McKesson-HBOC in 1997.
Food Lion 9/95 - 9/96
I worked in a small team of COBOL programmers that did primarily maintenance programming for in-store computer systems for all the Food Lion stores. Although the people I worked with were nice I did not find the job fulfilling. I decided that I liked working with hospital systems better, so I looked for a job in a hospital.
Celenese 8/78 - 9/88
Celanese was a leading global producer of value-added industrial chemicals, including acetyl products (acetic acid, vinyl acetate monomer, polyacetal products) and high-performance engineered polymers. I worked as a machine operator for almost ten years until the time of my accident in 1988.