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University of Alaska Anchorage

To whom it may concern:

I am writing this to recommend, without hesitation or reservation, Mr. Brian Havlovick for your project.

I have known Mr. Havlovick for six years and have always been impressed with his high degree of integrity, his work ethic and dedication, his professional background, education, and most important, his innate abilities to grasp the problem at hand and to work to provide the best and most reasonable build or solution. He is a “team player” who understands that individuals still have to “make plays.” He is forthright, insightful, loyal, and discreet.

Mr. Havlovick worked for me as a project engineer and, later, as project manager for the Alaska Medical Informatics Initiative (AMII), a four-year $2.0 M research and development contract sponsored by the U. S. Department of Defense. The goal of AMII was to develop and demonstrate a telemedicine system capable of monitoring trauma patients in real-time from the point of trauma to the emergency room. Conceived as a “dual-use” system that could be used in Alaska, and by the military, in remote and frontier environments, this system needed to be designed and executed such that it could work using satellite phone data circuits as default communications. It needed to work with various platforms and with various sensor systems. It needed to be easy to use and robust for field uses.

As Principle Investigator of AMII, I was tasked with conceiving the system and then getting it built on time and under-budget. Even well conceived and designed projects need a bit of luck, and it was my great fortune to hire Mr. Havlovick. While he knew next to nothing about telemedicine and telehealth applications in 2002, his electrical engineering background, and his nature insightfulness, allowed him to “come up to speed” very quickly. What impressed me most was his ability to listen, internalize the concept, and then break down the concept into processes that allowed us, and a work team that eventually grew to eight, to proceed smartly. Mr. Havlovick was able to engage me in a engineering “dialectic” (a engagement of argumentative “give and take”) that allowed us to quickly assess the nature of various development problems and find (not just my solution) but the best solution to the given problem. In short, he was the perfect balance to my ideas – he was the practical engineer asking, “… well, if we did it this way, this would save this (or allow us to do that”). While I pride myself in being able to be shown a better solution, I was truly impressed by Mr. Havlovick’s practical style of approaching problems and engaging in this dialectic for find the best solution.

In addition to his considerable contributions on the engineering side of the house, Mr. Havlovick brought an organization style to the AMII project that allowed for clear and discernable timelines and milestones, but built in flexibility needed for a research and demonstration project. He understood quickly that this was a research project (as opposed to a production project) and that often failure precedes success. Working with other team members, and graduate students, Mr. Havlovick quickly became my “right-hand man.” As the project moved forward, I found it increasingly easy to give him more responsibility for work group oversight and day-to-day management, which freed me to continue to work on the evaluation side of the project. With Mr. Havlovick’s able assistance, I was able to finish AMII on time and under-budget (more than rare for these types of projects). Following the successful completion of AMII, and with the permission of the U. S. Department of Defense, a small company, Foresight Medical Technologies, was founded in California to bring this technology, and its derivatives, to market.

To close, Mr. Havlovick has become a friend in these last years. He is a man of integrity with the disciplined mind and “people skills” (a rare combination in the “heads down engineering world) to become an asset to your organization. I would hire Mr. Havolvick again without hesitation or reservation. In short, he is a great engineer, project manager, an outstanding citizen, and family man.

I would be glad to discuss this matter with you in greater detail.

Sincerely,

Frederick W. Pearce, Ph.D.

P.I., Alaska Medical Informatics Initiative
Professor of Telecommunications
University of Alaska Anchorage