How I Started at Prestige Men's Health

From Patient to Lead Architect: How I Secured a Full-Time Salary Position at Prestige Men's Health

Every great career pivot starts with a connection. For me, it started in 2022 in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah. At the time, I was working as the Lead Developer for Spotlight Media Group. My living situation was ideal—I was within walking distance of the office, right behind the historic Cathedral of the Madeleine.

One evening, my roommate and friend, Steve, mentioned the testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) and wellness services he was receiving through Prestige Men's Health. I had been experiencing some symptoms of low testosterone myself, so the conversation naturally shifted to health and wellness.

As we talked, Steve mentioned that the owner, Dr. Joshua Schmidt, was actively having a development team build a custom Electronic Health Record (EHR) system in Laravel. Knowing my long history in web application development, Steve offered to pass my contact information along to Dr. Schmidt.

The very next day around 2:00 PM, while sitting in my office at Spotlight Media Group, my phone rang. It was Dr. Schmidt.

Aligning Technologies and Spotting Potential

During our initial call, Dr. Schmidt explained his vision for the custom EHR and described what his current development team was doing. It was a remarkable coincidence: they were building the system in Laravel—the exact framework I had just used to rebuild the proprietary PHP architecture I developed for Spotlight Media Group.

I told Dr. Schmidt I was highly interested in the project but was fully committed to my role at Spotlight. I offered to help or consult down the line if he ever needed an extra set of eyes.

Shortly after, the macroeconomic environment shifted. Spotlight Media Group began struggling as major real estate clients scaled back their marketing budgets and dropped our software tools. Determined to help the company recover, I spent six months working full-time while taking partial pay, keeping our new Affiliate Program afloat. Because I had invested wisely in previous years—specifically buying into NVIDIA, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies—I had the financial runway to support the company through its debt crisis without rushing into another job.

Ultimately, Spotlight could not outrun its liabilities. A year after that first phone call, and after experiencing the clinic's excellent care firsthand as a patient, I reached back out to Dr. Schmidt. It was time to look at his EHR system.

Uncovering the Mess: The Reality of Outsourcing

When I finally gained access to the codebase, I found exactly what you might expect from a low-tier agency structure.

The agency Dr. Schmidt hired was using a classic "white-label" model: an account manager acted as the local storefront, while the actual coding was outsourced to low-cost, third-world developers to maximize agency profit margins. The system was a disorganized, fragmented mess.

Worse, Dr. Schmidt was paying premium local rates for subpar, outsourced code.

I took a transparent, consultative approach:

• The Audit: I systematically audited the system and gently showed Dr. Schmidt the reality of his software.

• The Truth: He was initially skeptical that his primary contact was just a salesperson, but time and code metrics proved it.

• The Fix: I began cleaning up the existing technical debt, stabilizing the app, and building a foundation of trust.

Designing the Partnership

Once Dr. Schmidt saw the immediate velocity and quality I brought to the table, the value proposition was undeniable. Building a secure, compliant, and scalable EHR from scratch is a massive undertaking that requires an in-house expert—not an outsourced agency.

We negotiated a full-time salary position that included a hybrid schedule, allowing me to work in the office up to two days a week. This structure kept me tightly aligned with the clinical team, turning their daily operational pain points into clean, automated software features.

This role became one of the most rewarding engineering challenges of my career.

Want to see how I built it?

Click here to read the technical breakdown of the advanced architecture, the mistakes we corrected, and how I took this fragmented EHR from a broken agency hand-off to a flawless, production-grade system.