Paul Bradley – Health Interoperability Expert

Head shot of Paul Bradley

Hi, I’m Paul Bradley. I’m ≅ 60 years old, and I have over 40 years experience in software development. I started my programming journey by learning AutoLISP to interrogate engineering drawings produced in AutoCAD.

Throughout my thirty-year career, I’ve been an individual contributor, solutions architect & software development manager, leading teams of developers. I now specialise in Health Interoperability and have worked with HL7, FHIR, DICOM and IHE. I have 26 years of healthcare experience, focusing on designing & developing software that leverages technology to deliver cost-effective, safe, and stable solutions. My programming proficiency covers C#, .NET, Go, Python, Terraform & AWS cloud technologies.

This blob is my personal space to share thoughts, insights, and experiences accumulated over the years. It’s a site unafraid to eschew so-called “modern web” best practices. Web development broke when it started prioritising trends over substance. Forget hydration; just frigging use HTML!.

Honestly, if you’re here you probably know me; hopefully there is something useful or vaguely entertaining here.

Table of Contents

Career

Healthcare

Public/Private Sector

Contact

I‘m based in Carlisle, Cumbria, and can be reached via the email address shown in the contact details below:

Paul Bradley
Carlisle,
Cumbria,
contact@paulbradley.org

Projects

Outside of my professional work, I undertake recreational programming projects to scratch an itch or just make something exist:

Healthcare

Side Projects

Notes

AWS HealthLake

HealthLake is a FHIR compliant data store for healthcare information. I’m investigating its capabilities and how it can be leveraged for managing healthcare data effectively. Primarily, I am interested in understanding how it can be used to to provide an EPR Downtime Solution.

I’ve investigated using the DocumentReference and DocumentManifest resources to manage and organize healthcare documents within HealthLake. It is possible to convert XDS document entries to these FHIR resources as long as we use contained resources for elements such as authors, custodians, and related entities.

XDS document entries contain home community and repository information, which doesn`t map directly to FHIR fields. As such we need to add extensions to capture this information. These extensions can be mapped to the corresponding FHIR resources to maintain the provenance and context of the healthcare documents.

AWS Medical Comprehend

AWS Medical Comprehend is a natural language processing service that uses machine learning to extract medical information from unstructured text. I’d like to explore if I can use Medical Comprehend to analyze a discharge summary PDF document and modify it to highlight key medical information for easier review and processing. For example, it would be nice to colorize different types of medical entities such as medications, diagnoses, and procedures for quick identification.

Colophon

This domain has existed in one form or another since 2009. I actually bought the domain name while on honeymoon, so that the yearly renewal reminder would prompt me to get my wife something special for our wedding anniversary.

Its current inception as a blob was created in September 2026. It's a single HTML file that I edit and maintain. The single page is then processed through a custom static site generator that I developed in Go. The site generator minifies the HTML before creating compressed versions of the page in both GZIP & Brotli formats. The precompressed files are then served directly by the web server (Caddy) to improve performance.

The site is designed to be simple, fast, and easy to maintain, reflecting my philosophy of prioritizing substance over trends in web development. I tried to go with a full No CSS site, but in end I wanted to make use of a sticky header for navigation and use a smooth scroll behavior so the page has a minimal CSS declaration.

Access Keys; Keyboard shortcuts used on this page

Access keys are a cool feature of web browsers introduced in 1999 that allows a certain keyboard combination to jump to a certain part of the webpage. This is without any CSS or javascript, just purely implemented in the browser and HTML. It's a neat way to improve accessibility and navigation for users who prefer keyboard shortcuts. These are the access keys available on this page: