About · Brandt Welker

Brandt Welker in a NASA EMU spacesuit at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. — Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. EVA suit training, early NASA years.

I've spent about thirty years building and running systems where failure isn't an abstraction: spacecraft, veterans' health records, patient safety at the bedside. Today I'm Chief Technology Officer at InvisAlert Solutions, a patient-safety technology company. The work has changed shape a dozen times. The kind of work hasn't.

I started writing code back when Java was still called Oak. From there I went into NASA's Mission Operations and crew systems, including work through the Space Shuttle and Soyuz programs, then spent a decade in federal service and rose to Head of Systems Engineering and Architecture for Healthcare at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. After that I was CTO at MedicaSoft, where we built a certified, FHIR-native electronic health record from the ground up. Now I lead technology at InvisAlert.

All of that shaped how I think about technology. I'm suspicious of complexity, allergic to "that's how we've always done it," and convinced that most of what looks like culture is actually just incentives.

My writing spans healthcare, engineering, and technology broadly: how incentives actually shape the systems we build, why the durable ones get built by subtraction, and what genuinely changes, and what doesn't, as the tools get smarter. Healthcare is where I've spent my career.

I write here to think in public about the parts of this industry I know firsthand. I don't write about my own company's product category, and I don't deal well with hand-waving. If something here is useful, wrong, or worth an argument, I'd like to hear it.

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Brandt Welker is a healthcare technology executive whose career spans human spaceflight, federal health IT, and the software that runs a modern hospital. He began in NASA's Mission Operations and crew systems, including work through the Space Shuttle and Soyuz programs, served as Head of Systems Engineering and Architecture for Healthcare at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, built a certified, FHIR-native electronic health record as CTO of MedicaSoft, and is now Chief Technology Officer at InvisAlert Solutions, a patient-safety technology company.

Short versions

50 words Brandt Welker is CTO of InvisAlert Solutions and a thirty-year builder of high-stakes systems — from NASA Mission Operations to Head of Systems Engineering and Architecture for Healthcare at the VA to a certified, FHIR-native EHR. He writes about healthcare technology, systems engineering, and the incentives underneath both.

One line Healthcare technology executive; NASA and VA alumnus; writes on health IT, systems, and incentives.