What this blog is, and is not
3 min read
You already know what an EHR is. You may not know what an API is, or why anyone would care about the difference between HL7 v2 and FHIR. This blog exists for the gap between those two facts.
Who this is for
Graduate students in health informatics, especially the ones who arrived sideways: from nursing, pharmacy, public health, or the ward, rather than from a computer science degree. If you sometimes feel outgunned by classmates who already speak the language, this is written with you specifically in mind, not as a consolation prize but because your clinical instinct is the harder thing to teach, and you already have it.
What you will actually find here
Six kinds of posts, each with its own job:
Explainers take a concept apart the way this post just did: what is X, actually, assuming you know medicine but not computer science.
Tool Reviews name a tool's limitations first, rated for a student's usability, not a general audience's.
Guides tell you specifically what to do about grad school, career paths, and study strategy. Never "you've got this," always "here's what to do."
Labs are interactive, learn-by-doing posts you can finish in under ten minutes.
Resources are short, honestly annotated lists, always under ten items, with the catch on each one named plainly.
Field Notes are longer, more exploratory essays. This is where the intellectual range of the blog actually lives.
What you will not find
No affiliate links, anywhere, on any post. No sponsored content. No "10 tools you need to know about" written to satisfy a vendor relationship instead of a reader's actual question. If a tool is genuinely bad for a student's purposes, the review says so, first, before anything else.
Why this matters practically
Once you know the six types, you can use the site the way it is actually built to be used: skim Tool Reviews before choosing what to learn, come back to Field Notes when you want the longer argument, and treat Explainers as the fastest way to close a specific vocabulary gap before a meeting where everyone else already knows the term. You are in the right room. This is just the map of it.