Launch: Rural Health Transformation Grant Tracker

Throughout my career, I’ve worked alongside amazing developers to build applications that live on the internet. I’ve helped design systems, shape product direction, and define requirements — but I wasn’t writing the production code myself.

New inventions like Claude Code, Open AI Codex, and other tools have changed that. Now I talk to computers and build apps with them. Wild.

In the last few weeks I’ve pulled together a side project around a number of long-standing passions — open data, public health, and government transparency. It’s a system for tracking the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP), a $50 billion, five-year federal funding stream that was launched just last month.

It’s been up & running since last Friday as the Rural Health Transformation Grant Tracker newsletter: https://www.ruralhealthtransformation.life/.

It’s a perfect subject for me.

A clearly defined federal program with structured rules about programs, spending, and reporting
50 states implementing projects with variations on specific topics within a common framework
Publicly available federal spending data via USAspending
A mix of policy documents, press releases, and implementation updates

Stitching tools together in a human-supervised workflow

II’ve built it on top of a wintry mix of tools that I’ve learned and relied on for complex workflows and operations:

Google Cloud APIs for for storing screenshots of state program websites on Google Drive Workspace
monday.com for storing metadata about grant programs as well contact information for grantees, administrators, and contractors

ClaudeCode as the main application development and automation logic engine with Codex also hitting the repositories and reviewing code
Public open data sources (CMS, HHS, USAspending, state health departments)
Python, BeautifulSoup, hashlib, and other tools for Web scraping and diffing infrastructure (application runtime and orchestration)
GitHub as an operational backbone — serving as CI/CD engine (GitHub Actions), automation scheduler, artifact store, issue tracking system, public-facing hosting layer (via GitHub Pages, where applicable), and a complete operational audit trail
Playwright (headless Chromium) for automated screenshots
Monday.com for data analysis, dashboards, and outbound communication to states and other stakeholders
Substack for publication on a daily basis with weekly summaries

Github for code management and app hosting

The result is a stash of custom code in Github, a set of human workflows that I execute on every morning, and a newsletter with hand-verified updates on the civic engagement, grants, projects, and contractors for an enormous federal spending program in all 50 states. Features as follows:

Multi-source monitoring – Checks CMS, Google News, and state health departments
Intelligent filtering – Uses keyword matching and relevance scoring
Duplicate detection – Prevents duplicate alerts both on the news source and state website sources
Email notifications – Sends alerts when new items (website changes, new grant awards, outlays from are found
GitHub integration – Creates issues for new findings
Historical tracking – Maintains JSON database and historical screenshots of all findings
Scheduled execution – Runs daily via GitHub Actions

Monday.com API integration for data work, dashboards,and communications

The monitoring tools allow me to build a classification system for all of the projects— more to come on that as the project definitions emerge from the states.