My Story
My healthcare journey started in 2002 as a medical assistant at Greenville Technical College, where I quickly discovered that medical coding was where clinical knowledge and precision truly met. I was drawn to the work from day one — the logic of it, the way it connected patient care to data — and I stayed close to the clinical side through phlebotomy and serving as a bilingual liaison for Spanish-speaking patients. College had always been the goal, even when life made it complicated. I built my education one semester at a time while working and raising a family, and I’m proud of that — it taught me how to prioritize, persist, and perform under pressure.
I originally set my sights on medicine, but something shifted during my undergraduate studies at Clemson. My first Bioinformatics course with Dr. Feltus changed how I thought about impact. I never said it out loud at the time, but that class sparked a genuine passion for data — the kind that made me realize I could help more patients by improving the systems behind their care than by treating them one at a time. My background in biochemistry and years of hands-on coding work gave me a perspective that’s hard to replicate: I understand the clinical record, the financial record, and the data pipeline that connects them.
During the COVID years, that direction became a concrete goal. I began working toward a Master’s in Computer Science with a focus on building systems that close the gap between what medicine knows and what patients actually receive. What I once understood as a dream to become a physician, I now recognize as something larger: a conviction that the greatest barrier to quality care is not clinical knowledge — it’s the friction embedded in the systems around it. Clinicians already know how to heal. My work is to build the tools that get out of their way, so they can focus on the only thing that should ever matter in a hospital room: the patient in front of them. That’s not what gets me to work every day. It’s what keeps me there.