It was interesting to play a technical support role in PSEGLI’s effort to upgrade their dispatch and outage management (CAD/OMS) system. For this role I had to interact with users, the application vendor, and co-workers to troubleshoot issues with the system. My coding skills came in handy for maintaining HTML pages that were used as an entry way into one of the key components of the system. I also participated on the team responsible for high availability and DR testing. In addition, I was engaged with supporting system training where I had to resolve various user access issues experienced by trainers and users.

I served as an IT subject matter expert (SME) for the company's CRM tool (ESAWS). One of my responsibilities was to provide training sessions to the new IT team so they could take over support and development of the CRM. These sessions involved writing and executing SQL queries against an Oracle backend database, along with explaining Visual Studio C# code to explain service request movement within the CRM. In addition, I answered business inquiries by using analysis and by supplying data in an Excel spreadsheet that I extracted by running SQL against an Oracle database. I also served as a liaison between the business and IT, and ensured business activities were not negatively impacted by IT so that IT would be seen in a positive light.

I worked on Emblem Health's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software (ESAWS). As a Visual Studio developer I maintained and wrote code in C# in the MVP pattern (similar to MVC). In addition to being a developer I often interfaced with the business to answer requests and resolve issues that arose via normal operations in ESAWS. This position also involved extensive SQL querying used to create scripts to control workflow, and to provide the business with current rules for workflow. Many of the workflows rules were based on data contained in the Oracle back end database. In this position I was also responsible to work with PPM (project portfolio management). This included writing project related documentation such as the TRD (technical requirements document) and production move sheet, along with meeting with the business to discuss requirements and to receive written approval prior to beginning work.

I had wanted to get into web work for some time. My previous position led to this position where I developed and maintained our companies website using Visual Studio ASP.NET written in Visual Basic. These web pages invoked web services to extract data from an Oracle back end. I also ran queries against the Oracle back end to answer end user questions and to problem solve. In addition, I wrote web services used by other teams for retrieving member and provider data.

This was a major role for me. I interviewed to move within my company from support to the organization's EDI team. There I developed and maintained the organization's implementation for HIPAA enrollment using the ANSI 834 enrollment specification. This was an implementation in Visual Basic with an MS SQL Server back end. I also supported the HIPAA ANSI 837 EDI claims implementation for both medical and hospital claims. Another responsibility I had was to work with a software tool called Automate to automate routine tasks such as transmitting and receiving files via FTP. This led to my next interest, and position, with the web team, as I began performing some software maintenance on the companies' internet site using Visual Studio ASP.NET and coding with Visual Basic.

As support coordinator I supervised and coordinated work for an IT support team of three people. I used MS-Access to run queries and produce reports to assist end users. I also took the initiative to document recurring issues and created a common support fix book to reduce user resolution wait time, and to aid in devising a permanent fix. I also modified and repaired programs in BASIC to produce mass mailings and fix data integrity problems. This was my initial role in EmblemHealth, and my introduction to health care.