The Problem That Taught Me to Code

I joined my father's medical practice after college in 2010 and became deeply involved in its operations and growth. By around 2016, I was spending much of my time trying to understand how the business was working from the inside. Better information was not an abstract interest. It was part of operating the practice well.

The systems available to us did not make it easy to get the answers I wanted. I could receive reports, but I wanted to follow an operating question to the underlying information and understand it for myself. That frustration became the starting point for BIVI.

I taught myself SQL because I wanted to work directly with the practice's data. I could ask whether workflows were being followed and investigate where information had been entered or applied incorrectly. At first, the aim was to understand what was happening well enough to correct it.

Learning SQL changed the way I approached the work. Data gave me visibility into a business I was already helping to run. It also made the limits of reporting more apparent. Knowing what was happening was useful, but it did not change the workflow that produced the information.

Philippe Bibi had already been my partner in Mirror Mirror. Around 2016, we began working on BIVI together. The name came from Bibi + Vitenas. I remember months of intensive work: Philippe helped provide high-level technical direction, and we both learned as we built.

We worked through ASP.NET teaching, including Venkat's YouTube material, books, and MIT OpenCourseWare computer-science lectures. Development meant spending considerable time in documentation and Stack Overflow, comparing approaches and working through the problems a change introduced. It was much slower than the AI-assisted development workflows I use today.

We QA-tested the system extensively before trusting it in production at the medical practice. The development and production experience described here is my firsthand recollection of our work together.

New-patient paperwork was one important production workflow. Previously, patients completed paper forms, employees re-entered information into the practice-management system, and someone had to check that the transfer had occurred. SQL helped me inspect that process; BIVI let us change it.

Patients could complete their paperwork digitally. The resulting demographic information was mapped into the practice-management environment, and completed documents were linked to the appropriate patient files. This removed substantial manual data-entry work and reduced a meaningful source of human error.

The change was upstream of reporting. Instead of checking whether someone had correctly copied information from one place to another, we had removed much of that manual handling from the workflow. BIVI worked alongside the incumbent practice-management system, which remained the system around which the practice operated.

The recovered source shows a C# ASP.NET Web Forms application with SQL Server data access. It contains code for configurable forms, reminders and rescheduling, SMS and email, signatures and documents, dashboards, and integration with the practice-management environment. Those connections show how the application extended from information gathering into the work around it.

The source establishes implemented code paths and architecture. It does not independently establish which features were used in production, adoption, business impact, or a complete deployment history, and the recovered copy has no usable Git chronology. The patient-paperwork account comes from my experience, not from treating every recovered feature as an operational one.

Philippe and I believed BIVI could address more of the practice's work if we could keep widening its scope. The pace and difficulty of development constrained how quickly we could do that.

Years later, I returned to many of these operating problems with Vitenas OS. BIVI was where I first worked through the transition from querying the information behind a business to building software that changed how that information was created.