athenahealth — Patient Financial Products

At athenahealth, I led development on patient-facing payment systems and internal platform tooling across a set of products that processed $2.5B in annual payments for roughly 30M monthly active users. My work covered the full stack: schema-driven UI architecture for complex patient billing routes, secure authentication flows, serverless payment systems, and deployment tooling for AWS infrastructure. I took multiple initiatives from concept through general availability, with a strong focus on reliability, accessibility, and operational clarity in a domain where errors carry real consequences for patients.

TypeScript · Node.js · React · AWS Lambda · API Gateway · CloudWatch · Jenkins · Serverless architecture

Healthcare billing products have to solve two problems at once: they need to be operationally rigorous, and they need to be understandable to people who may already be stressed, confused, or under time pressure. This work sat at that intersection. I was responsible for building systems that made payment flows secure and maintainable on the engineering side, while still keeping the patient experience legible and accessible.

One major part of the work was building schema-driven components for patient billing routes with layered access rules and different delivery contexts. These components supported experiences across paper statements, e-statements, the patient portal, and auto-pay notifications, allowing the same underlying system to adapt to different permissions and communication channels without fragmenting into one-off implementations.

This approach made the product surface easier to extend and reason about as requirements evolved. Instead of hard-coding each route separately, the UI could derive behavior from structured definitions, which reduced duplication and made the system safer to change over time.

I also built an entirely serverless architecture from scratch for prepaid-plan workflows, which on its own processed millions of dollars per week. Alongside the product work, I developed a TypeScript and Node.js deployment scripting library used with Jenkins and AWS orchestration, including CloudWatch dashboards defined directly in code so infrastructure and observability could be provisioned consistently.

That combination mattered because payment systems do not just need features; they need repeatable delivery and traceable operations. The goal was to make releases more reliable, reduce manual deployment risk, and ensure the team could inspect system behavior without relying on ad hoc setup.

Patient workflows included secure identity verification flows such as SMS and voice-call 2FA, integrated into the larger billing and portal experience. Accessibility was also a core requirement in the work, not a late-stage enhancement, because in healthcare a confusing interface can directly block someone from paying a bill or understanding their options.

The result was a set of systems designed for real-world use: high scale, strict operational requirements, and user flows that had to remain clear under pressure. It was the kind of engineering work where product design, backend architecture, and delivery infrastructure all had to hold up together.