New Job and Redbrick Health

Oct 23 2011

I am now gainfully employed at Redbrick Health. I started a few weeks ago and most of the recent weeks has been getting familiar with their main software product. For those who are not familiar with Redbrick, it is a company that tries to reduce health costs of large "self-insured" companies by improving the health behavior of the employees. A "self-insured" company is one that pays for the health costs for the employes as they occur and uses a large health company (such as Blue Cross Blue Shield) only for administration and accounting purposes. Because they pay for the costs directly, these companies have an incentive to reduce the health costs of their employees. 

Redbrick helps reduce their costs by using software and coaching programs that encourage employees to do things like eat better, exercise more, take their medications, and see the doctor for needed checkups. What is novel about Redbrick is in how the software works. It takes its cue from some of the social gaming software (Farmville comes to mind) that is out there and tries to make improving one's health a bit of a game where you can earn points and achieve goals on a smaller time interval than is typical for many health programs.

The development environment is Grails and Groovy. It makes for quite a different development approach than I have seen before. Java opened the door on using "reflection" to automatically bind parts of your application together. With Grails and Groovy, reflection is how even the simplest numeric operation is performed and calling a method using reflection is as simple as just making the method call or "pseudo-accessing" an attribute. In Grails, a lot of application implementation happens by Groovy implied reflection "magic". The other big thing in Groovy is "closures" which I have found radically changes the design of most of the software I write.

Because of my new job, my work on ratings is currently on hold. There is quite a bit of new code in it and it is much more configurable than before. For those who want to see this code in its current raw state please download the zip file.

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