James LaPlante

I'm now in a senior management position and responsible for most of CHA's IT infrastructure and multiple service lines including IT Security, Help Desk, Desktop support, Networking, Telecom, and Biomedical Services covering 3 hospitals and a network of primary care and specialty practices. I have significant involvement in emergency preparedness, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance, and operating and capital budgeting. In 2016 I help Cambridge Health Alliance move to Google Workspace saving CHA millions of dollars in operating costs. I'm now architecting our move to Google Cloud. I prefer hands on learning. For example, I recently set up Django Rest Framework Protected by Cloud Armor on Google Cloud in our VPC, Virtual Private Cloud allowing AppSheet to interface with our internal paging system. To overcome the limitation in AppSheet pulling data via a REST API, I also setup a reusable service to write data to any Google Sheet using Google APIs. Our Web Development team plans to use this infrastructure to mobile enable their future applications for all of our staff. I have been working in Healthcare IT for over 30 years. At Cambridge Health Alliance, CHA, I started as an Senior Database Administrator and Linux System Admin for an Epic ambulatory implementation before being promoted to Senior Director. My areas of responsibility have continued to grow over the years. I started my career designing computers and writing firmware based operating systems. I eventually moved onto software and web development with relational database back-ends. I spent 4 years developing an EHR for Children's Hospital Boston before becoming an Oracle database administrator there. Specialties: Google Cloud, AppSheet, Django, Django Rest Framework, Epic Cache on Unix System Manager through Epic 2014 Release, Oracle database administration, virtualization technologies, server architecture, data center moves