About

I’m a doctor who writes code. I finished a computing degree and a medical degree, in that order of interest and the reverse order of usefulness, and have been finding out ever since that the combination is rarer and more useful than either one alone. I work across clinical medicine, digital-health policy, and the tech between them - which in practice means I spend a lot of time explaining each of those worlds to the other two.

The seam (or maybe more fittingly, the gap) is wider than it should be. So many tiny places of friction that add up to something huge. It shows up in clinical work: scheduling shifts that take a doctor an evening to distribute, filing notes that get shorter and shorter as exhaustion settles in, navigating through prescription interfaces built by someone who didn’t have to use them at 3am. Everyday things that make an already challenging job even harder instead of easier. And even more importantly, it appears in the translation of research to patient reality. It is the countless hours spent looking over experiments, algorithms, theses, graphs, electrodes and molecules that get consumed by the ever-hungry wheel of “publish or perish”, their results never reaching the bedside. So much prose can be — and has been — written on the abyss between R&D and mainstream medicine.

Some of those problems I’ve solved for myself and the people I work with. Some of them turn out not to be science problems at all; they’re policy problems wearing a technical costume, and you only find that out by pushing on them.

So I push on them.

When I tried to find how well different neighbourhoods in Athens were served by emergency rooms, the project’s technical difficulty paled in front of the data collection challenges of sorting through scanned PDFs and years-old datasets. When I asked how Greece’s e-prescription infrastructure actually works — what’s documented, what’s accessible — the answers were slow and thin. When I pointed out to a room full of experts the insufficient digital skills education in the curricula of a health workforce that’s rapidly digitalising, I was faced with vagueness, jargon, and deflections. Those are not technical failures. They are choices, conscious or not, about who gets to understand the system they’re already inside, who gets to build the future of healthcare, and who gets to own what it knows about them.

Change is slow, gradual, even painful, but it can’t be anything else. Swapping code or components is easy; affecting hearts and minds, systems and playbooks, that’s the hard part and the one worth pushing for.

In this environment, with these constraints and also equally powerful opportunities, how can I not use every tool at my disposal? I help healthcare professionals stay on the edge of medical technology through consulting and education. Separately, I try to bring a clinician’s viewpoint to engineers and computer scientists, doing my part for interprofessional collaboration. I advise different groups and networks, which includes me sitting on the HTA Committee of the Hellenic Ministry of Health as a clinical expert on health technology assessment, arguing about what evidence is good enough to justify spending public money. And, when I can find the time, I push on every lever I can find to advocate in favour of patients and healthcare professionals, trying to keep policy making honest and focused on what matters.

I’m heading toward neurology, and past it toward neurorehabilitation and brain–computer interfaces: the field where I think the gap between what’s demonstrated in a paper and what works on an actual patient is widest and most interesting, and the topic that has honestly fascinated me since I was old enough to wonder what sleep actually is.

Elsewhere: I keep a homelab that mostly runs, 3D print things that mostly work, solve OSINT puzzles (differential diagnosis with better scenery), read, and write, and rant.

This piece of text is a good example of what the rest of this website is: some things about myself and my work, policy arguments, tutorials and guides for things that probably took me too long to figure out; but also my thoughts, stances, and completely un-asked-for opinions. And notes I want to be able to find again.

If you want to share your opinion, collaborate, ask me about my work, or anything else really, you can reach me at info@ncxifaras.com.