Greetings, My name is BenRifkah Bergsten-Buret, Ben for short. I was raised in the Pacific Northwest and currently live in Seattle, Washington.
Since 2018 I’ve supported the University of Washington’s Cardiovascular Health Research Unit (CHRU), A joint program of the University of Washington School of Medicine and School of Public Health with investigators participating in numerous inter-institutional research projects bridging medicine and public health to improve cardiovascular and other health outcomes.
I serve as the IT team lead helping to set strategic IT direction for the unit as well as performing hands on system administration and tech support for cloud services, in-house Windows and Linux servers and individual workstations.
Fromm 2005 to 2018 I supported the University of Washington’s Clinical Trials Center which served as the data coordinating center of the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC), one of the world’s largest emergency medicine research initiatives.
I supported a collection of web applications written in Perl, JavaScript, jQuery, Prototype.js, HTML::Mason, Moose, PHP, Laravel and Bootstrap. I developed platform and deployment tools to handle the repetitive tasks and keep our small team productive.
I handled server installs, upgrades, migrations, failures and decommissions. I implemented systems compliant with federal HIPAA, 21 CFR 11 electronic signature regulations.
I’ve served as a parenting instructor at Break Through Learning Center. I also volunteered as scribe for the PTA and as a web administrator and Code.org hour of code facilitator for my son’s elementary school. When he metriculated to middle school continued volunteering with the PTSA as Secretary, leading migration efforts to Google Workspace and providing technical support for virtual meetings during COVID-19 stay at home periods.
If your team is about making a difference in the world, in any business sector, I’d love to hear from you.
HeartMap Dynamic AED Registry
One past project I’m especially proud of was developing the website and platform for the HeartMap Dynamic AED Registry. This was a community improvement project to make life saving Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) available to bystanders who witnessed a cardiac arrest.
I supported this multi-phase project in development and system administration capacities:
Find ‘em
Locate the AEDs by enlisting the general public to participate in crowd-sourcing contests to find AEDs in their area to win cash prizes. Contests have been conducted in Philadelphia, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Tucson and other locations. More contests are in planning stages. I developed the post-pilot platform using the Laravel PHP framework. The contest web application supports users on all modern mobile platorms as they scour the city and report AED locations. It leverages geolocation and Google places through progressive enhancement to assist in address entry and validation.
Tag ‘em
Verify AEDs reported in contests and label them with 2-dimensional barcode (QR code) stickers that will prompt people to scan and report AED use and maintenance. Staff at participating universities access the labeler web application to visit, verify and label the AEDs. My responsibilities included designing and implementing the labeling user experience and reporting system. I also developed the QR codes using Douglas Crockford’s Base32 encoding in order to reduce typing errors when using the fallback text url.
Track ‘em
The AED registry is now open for bystanders and AED owners to report the status and maintenance of AEDs. For recording non-clinical interactions we employ progressive data capture using a short wizard and small data forms rather than long forms. This short circuits the traditional concept of web “conversions” ensuring that we get some usable data even if users abandon reports before completing them.
Use ‘em
This phase, unfortunately cut short before launch, was a registry of cardiac events. Emergency medical service providers at participating agencies would access our registry to report when they were called to the scene where an AED had been used by bystanders to treat a patient. This was built on the UWCTC Clinical Data Entry platform that supported the ROC studies. A key responsibility of mine was to abstract the data entry authentication/authorization making it pluggable to allow integration with other platforms including Laravel and Django.
Save Lives!
The final phase was to make the AED location information in the registry available to 3rd parties and the general public so that they could located AEDS when they are needed. I tracked FDA Unique Device Identifiication (UDI) technical standards and implementation so that our team was ready to hit the ground running and integrate with the Global UDI Database (GUDID).