I build clinical AI and NLP systems ✨ at Boston Children's Hospital 🏥 on the @smart-on-fhir / Cumulus team ☁️. Over the past ~9 years I've contributed to numerous full-stack web development projects 🕸️ in the Healthcare interoperability space; in the past ~2 years I've been working on LLM-based clinical information extraction, designing pipelines that turn unstructured clinical notes into structured, research-ready data across multiple disease studies. I earned my CS Master's from Tufts in 2021 🐘, focused on AI/ML and AI ethics 🤖⚖️ for public-sector and healthcare applications.
🔬 What I'm working on now
- Clinical LLM extraction at scale. I work in the Cumulus ecosystem to enable a model-agnostic NLP extraction platform that runs frontier, open-weight, and locally-hosted models against real FHIR clinical-note corpora, with MLflow experiment tracking for token economics, model parameters, and extraction metrics.
- We build Cumulus-ETL and Cumulus-Library to extract population-scale data across partner health-sites.
- We also support a number of specific studies across disease-specific study libraries to enable exploration of domain-specific research questions. Some areas we're using cumulus and LLMs to explore include the relationship between pediatric IBD outcomes and medications, immune-related adverse events in kidney-transplant patients, and more!
- Evaluation & annotation. I translate clinical chart-review guidelines into Label Studio annotation interfaces so clinicians can produce the gold-standard datasets our extraction pipelines are measured against.
- Research & publishing. I work with my colleagues to publish on the impact that interoperability and LLM systems can have on multiple levels of clinical care.
🔭 Previously
- @MITRE: advancing oncology through data standards like FHIR and mCODE — we built the mCODE Extraction Framework to enable structured data extraction in support of an oncology clinical trial, and we built FluxNotes to imagine what the future of multi-modal data capture could look like – before LLMs 😆!
🤝 Beyond the day job
- 🌱 Ongoing interest in fairness, accountability, transparency, and power in healthcare algorithms — and what technologists, regulators, and citizens can do about them.
- 👯 Local civic-data projects like visualizing Arlington Town Meeting Member voting histories with @GrahamGoudeau and @mgramigna.
- 🍶 I design and maintain SakeDayEast.com pro bono — the home of Sake Day East, New England's largest sake tasting and Boston's celebration of World Sake Day. It's built on Wix so the head organizer can keep it running without a developer on call; I handle design (with a major redesign from 2025 to 2026), help with upkeep, and enjoy supporting Boston's growing sake community!
📫 Reach me: email preferred — dtphelan1<<at>>gmail<<dot>>com · 🌐 dylanphelan.tech · 😄 Pronouns: he/him