About

I work across healthcare strategy, operations, analytics, software, publishing, and institution building. The common thread is operating discipline: finding where cost, quality, access, trust, and workflow problems are hiding inside systems that already look measured.

At Penn Medicine, my work sits in access, AI, and analytics. I deploy and validate speech analytics across access-center operations, build quality measurement frameworks, and design analysis around the operational behaviors that shape patient access, service quality, and avoidable cost.

I also co-founded the American Journal of Healthcare Strategy, where I help build the publication, software, research products, podcasts, and operating infrastructure behind the institution. AJHCS is its own organization and voice. This site is separate: it is my public operating record.

This site gives employers, collaborators, conference peers, students, researchers, and operators a way to understand what I have built, how I think, what evidence supports the work, and where to reach me.

Current Work

Area	What It Means
Penn Medicine	Access, AI, analytics, speech analytics validation, quality measurement, and operational performance analysis.
American Journal of Healthcare Strategy	Co-founder and operator of a healthcare strategy publication, media platform, software stack, research-product pipeline, and sponsor-supported institution.
Delaware Valley HIMSS	Board member, with public work around healthcare technology, access, and strategy.
colelyons.com	A personal publication and body-of-work record separate from AJHCS.

Formation

My training crosses healthcare administration, business, systems engineering, biology, public health, computer science, and electrical engineering. I do not think of that as scattered. It is why I can move between clinical operations, software, AI validation, strategy, and frontline workflow without mistaking one layer for the whole system.

Thread	Where It Came From	What It Added
Technical foundation	Wake Technical Community College, computer science and electrical engineering; CS50	Programming fundamentals, systems thinking, and comfort learning technical subjects from first principles.
Science and research foundation	University of North Carolina at Charlotte, biology and public health; epidemiology and clinical research coursework	Public-health reasoning, research methods, lab exposure, and respect for evidence quality.
Clinical floor foundation	Clinical Medical Assistant Certification and Jefferson neurology work	Clinical vocabulary, patient-room reality, documentation pressure, prior authorization friction, and the operational constraints clinicians feel directly.
Healthcare and business operating layer	Thomas Jefferson University BS in Health Services Management and MBA in Innovation and Management	Healthcare administration, strategy, management, finance, and organizational execution.
Systems-engineering spine	Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering MS in Health Systems Engineering, in progress	A formal systems frame for access, quality, AI, measurement, incentives, and operational design.

Credentials

The credentials that matter most to the story are not the ones that sound most impressive. They are the ones that changed how I work.

Credential	Why It Matters Here
CS50	A durable software foundation. It made later work in analytics, automation, prompt engineering, and agentic tooling easier to reason about.
Clinical Medical Assistant Certification (CMAC)	The clinical credential grounded later strategy and AI work in actual care delivery.
Penn AI implementation program	A practical implementation signal from the environment where I am currently doing healthcare AI work.
Epidemiology and Clinical Research Foundations	These support the site’s source discipline: what can be claimed, what should be caveated, and what needs stronger measurement.
Trusted Access for Cyber	A useful security and adversarial-thinking signal, especially for AI systems, healthcare data, and institutional tooling.

I treat credentials as evidence of range, not authority by themselves. The useful question is whether the training changed how I build, measure, validate, or explain the work.

Public Presence And Contact

Path	Best Use
Email	Direct questions, project follow-up, student questions, collaboration ideas, and sensitive context that should not start in a public thread.
LinkedIn	Current professional context, shared connections, conference follow-up, and lightweight outreach.
Public links	Public links to AJHCS, GitHub, podcast appearances, profiles, conference/community pages, older writing, and external validation.
Body of work	The structured body of work: projects, systems, writing, and field notes.

Conference presence matters because many of the relationships and operating questions behind the work came from rooms where healthcare leaders were comparing what was actually hard. The homepage link trail and field notes keep that context available without making it the site’s main identity.