Joseph B. Smith
Staff Practice Accountant, OneOncology · MAcc candidate, Belmont
By day I work practice revenue at OneOncology while finishing a Master of Accountancy at Belmont, on the way to the CPA. After hours I build the software my field is missing and write institutional history under my own imprint. This is the front door; the rooms are inside.
The work
How oncology practices get paid — that's the field.
I'm a Staff Practice Accountant at OneOncology, working practice revenue — the ledger side of cancer care. I'm finishing a Master of Accountancy at Belmont University, with the CPA next.
Revenue work runs on data that is public but unusable: price-transparency files nobody opens, payor behavior nobody tracks. I build tools for that under Branmoor — ClearRate reads hospital price-transparency files at scale, and a payor-intelligence layer watches how payors actually behave.
Essays on healthcare revenue are coming — first up, what thousands of hospital price files actually say. They'll live here when they do.
The writing
Institutional and financial history, written from primary sources.
Nonfiction publishes under the Monte Vista Research Institute — a one-desk imprint. The project is a library: a long shelf of histories of money, credit, and the institutions that hold them together, written volume by volume.
First in draft: The New York Clearing House, 1853–1913 — how a private association of banks issued emergency money through four panics, half a century before the Federal Reserve existed.
There is fiction too. It lives under a pen name, and the two shelves don't meet.
The code
Tools the work needs, built because they didn't exist.
- ClearRate — crawls hospital price-transparency files at scale and turns them into one queryable dataset. Runs under Branmoor; private for now.
- A personal ERP — a Workday-inspired system for one household: strict double-entry core, dimensional reporting, statement ingestion and reconciliation, fixed assets, debt, budgets, forecasts, KPIs. Local-first and private. The books balance.
- payor-intelligence — watching how payors behave, in the open.
- payor-proxy — a small proxy layer for payor-data work.
- This site — one hand-written HTML file with a working radio. The receipts are in the colophon.
Everything public is at github.com/josephbsmith.
Now
Working revenue at OneOncology. MAcc coursework at Belmont. Building out ClearRate's dataset. Drafting the Clearing House monograph. Teaching this website to play the radio.
Updated July 2026 · the idea of a now page is borrowed from Derek Sivers.
Colophon
One HTML file. No framework, no build step, no analytics, no cookies — view source and you've seen the whole thing.
The background is a pseudo-3D coastline drawn on a ~320×180 canvas at 60 frames a second and upscaled with hard pixels. The road bends on a random walk; the scenery pans with accumulated heading, the way a real windshield does. Everything respects reduced-motion settings.
The radio is a two-and-a-quarter-hour station — K-Billy's Super Sounds of the 70's, assembled in GarageBand — streamed in range requests from object storage, so you only download what you actually listen to.
Built at a terminal with Claude Code riding shotgun. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages.