Video Transcript
- Hello. Hi, my name is Kito Lord, I'm a practicing emergency medicine physician. Today I'm here with a special guest, Dr. John Manning. John, how are you doing today?
- Pretty well. How are you, Kito?
- I'm doing pretty well. So today we're gonna talk about apps and so, you know a thing or two about apps, is that right?
- I hope so, at this point. Hopefully.
- Yeah, so tell, tell the audience a little bit about your journey, you know, from emergency medicine resident, to now, you know, being an app guru, and I do mean app guru, but how did you get involved with apps to begin with?
- So, always had an entrepreneurial kick, thanks to my parents, basically grew up building things in our backyard, with a full professional machine shop. Was a scribe in the era from paper charting, and when we transitioned to electronic, had an idea for an app at the first ACEP Hackathon in Chicago, that we pitched, and that we got the grand prize for, which was great.
- That's amazing.
- It also included an opportunity to speak at a Illinois Department of Public Health event. So I was sitting with some friends that were Java developers and said, "Let's make an app." And so we did, a lot of, it was self-taught for myself and the other Java developer. Pitched it, presented, everything was really cool. Fast forward a little bit, after fellowship, after learning more about informatics, the idea was, are we going to keep doing things in Java? There's this newer language called Kotlin, are we gonna transition over? And then learned of a new thing called Flutter, and this is Dash, that represents Flutter and Dart
- Hey, Dash.
- And basically fell in love with Flutter, and I've been building things in that ever since. So flutter is Google's UI framework that you can use to build apps for Android, iOS, Web, Mac, PC, and Linux. So all six platforms, you can have a screen, you can build with one codebase. So third largest thing on GitHub, over a million apps have been developed and published. It's in the Brazilian government's app, it's in the New York Times app, universal Studios, BMW, it's all over the place at this point. And I get the privilege of going to Google-related things as an expert in Dart and Flutter, because I can just talk and write code at the same time. Apparently that's a thing. Thanks emergency medicine. But then, I have a company where we've been building and deploying custom-based software solutions that use Flutter and connect to healthcare data.
- Wow. So, you know, as an emergency medicine physician, I'm seeing patients, why is this important to me? Like, explain why should I be involved with apps, why should I care? You know, what is in it for me as an emergency medicine physician, day in, day out?
- You are an expert user of your system. Like, your daily life is something that is very difficult to recreate on paper through user journey, through other elements. The chaos of your life as an emergency physician, you can only use so much of your cognitive effort on things that really don't work well and slow you down. So it's critical for you, you are the best idea generators for new applications that can help make your life easier, as well as the lives of those that are around you, as you care for patients of all ages and all complaints. So realistically, you're in a really nice position of coming up with new things that can make your lives better so that you're not at high risk for burnout, and that you're not having to be stuck next to a computer all the time. And this is one way that you can take ownership of the designs that you've been wanting this whole time.
- Right. That's awesome. Now, when you first started talking about it, you mentioned about the coding, how long does it take to create an app? I mean, you know, are we talking about months here, or what exactly, you know, how long does it take for us to develop something?
- So a lot of data showed that when you're building something in Flutter, it is literally twice, or faster, twice as fast, as you would if you're just a regular software developer. Of course, if you're managing multiple codebases, all of that.
- Right.
- You're asking, as a healthcare person, to get my foot in the door with development. And the interesting thing about the language Dart, the toolkit Flutter, is that for the user interface, it's pretty easy, and by comparison, you just think of it as like Lego building blocks, where you have one thing that connects to another that connects to another, they're all called widgets. And the connection is like, if you're building a car, or like if you're driving a car, you don't necessarily have to know about spark plugs and piston engines and all of that, just to go, the fact of how this has a, it's called a declarative type of programming compared to imperative, you don't need to know all those details, you just say, "Give me this," and it works. And so the barrier to entry, especially for design, is way less.
- Okay. So it sounds like, you know, it's easier now than ever for physicians to get involved with apps and programming, even though it sounds intimidating, we should not be intimidated, is that kind of the message that I'm hearing right there?
- Yeah. So, I mean, even if you're looking at a idea on a sheet of paper, you draw it out, just don't let things get like that in your way, or like, don't let those elements get in your way. If it's coming to connecting to healthcare data, you should use a thing called Fire, we made a thing called Firefly that connects all of Flutter into all the published versions of Fire. So you may wanna work with us, but developers in eight countries have been using this, globally, to build solutions across the board. And so, you know, we're trying to make this as easy as we can for you, and the benefit of building these types of solutions using languages that are open source, well vetted, loved by a global community, you know, this is the time for you to actually take those ideas and move them forward.
- Wow, John. Well, thank you John, this has been an excellent discussion, I think you hit some real key highlights there. Shout out to the Hackathon. So if you have a chance to get involved with the Hackathon, obviously. And Flutter is another great opportunity for people to get involved with as well. So again, thank you for your time, and, you know, we'll come back and we'll discuss things more, we appreciated today.
- Great. Take care, Kito.
- Thank you, take care. Bye-Bye.
