After completing my fellowship training in cardiology at UT Southwestern, I joined the faculty as a non-invasive clinical cardiologist. I served as project manager and medical director for the multi-year initial enrollment phase of the Dallas Heart Study. During that time I completed a Master's degree in Information Systems, and guided the design of the database and I.T. infrastructure for the Dallas Heart Study. Following didactic training in data warehouse design, I subsequently co-led the group creating what is now the Enterprise Data Warehouse at UT Southwestern. I received a second Master's degree in Healthcare Management, and became UT Southwestern Health System's first Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) in 2011, achieving board certification in clinical informatics in 2015. 

Since becoming CMIO, I've helped coach adoption of agile (rapid-cycle) principle and practices for our EHR configuration, including for patient registry and clinical decision support (CDS) configuration. My co-investigators and I have given multiple tutorials on "Agile CDS" at national informatics conferences. Our work employing agile techniques to develop 40 (now 104) real-time specialty patient registries in the EHR with accompanying electronic quality measures received 1st place nationally in the Healthcare Informatics' Innovator Awards for 2016. Our current focus is on improving the "signal-to-noise" ratio of modern EHRs from a clinician's perspective, and leveraging data captured during clinical care for quality improvement and pragmatic clinical research using standard terminologies.