Building companies · Chicago
I say yes.
Then I go build it.
Lee Springer leads technology at Empower Health Services. Five people, ten years, a national HIPAA platform. The product is built in-house.
345k
Members on the platform
5
Person shop that ships the platform
19 yrs
Shipping production systems
Weekly
Production cadence
02 — How I operate
Small teams. No gatekeepers. The work still has to survive an audit.
01
Say yes. Then go build it.
I learned this as a private technical advisor when the request was fiber around an estate, a fax on a yacht, or a plane that had to work. The tech often did not exist. The answer was still yes — and then the work to make it true.
02
Small teams, no gatekeepers.
Coordination tax kills more products than missing features. Five people who own the stack will outrun fifty who wait on a ticket queue. AI is a force multiplier. The secret sauce is still the team.
03
Own the boring parts that break trust.
HIPAA, NIST, MFA, disaster recovery, dependency patches, first-pass deploy rates. Innovation that cannot survive an audit is a demo. I treat security and QA as product, not afterthought.
04
Open the intelligence.
I would rather over-document in Markdown than become a mystery. If the team can see the work, they can move it. Asynchronous, decentralized collaboration is not a slogan. It is how we ship.
- Google Cloud
- MongoDB Atlas
- BigQuery
- Cloud Run
- TypeScript
- HIPAA
- NIST CSF 2.0
- Playwright
- Firebase Auth
- Entra External ID
- Quest HL7
- Twilio
- AI agents
- GitHub
03 — In the room
What they actually say
“WOW — Lee is instrumental in EVERYTHING EHS. He is a great ambassador moving us forward with technology in every aspect of the company. I like to think of him as our Chief Innovation Officer.”
“The strong security posture exhibited during this assessment reflects an institutional focus and priority on maintaining a robust security environment.”
“Lee is an idea factory. He will develop ideas and solutions without much oversight. He is never satisfied with the status quo.”
04 — Now
Currently
Still at Empower. Still shipping. Five people. That is the point.
Leading
Technology at Empower Health Services — platform, data, security, and a five-person team that ships.
Building
Playwright-backed QA I can hand off, first-pass deploy tracking, and six live labs on this domain — ePricing, Sudoku Versus, Flinch, Par Force, Lily Lane, and Almanac.
From
Plainfield. Chicago when it matters. Occasional travel.