2010 Community Board Member Candidates

Instructions

Please take time to review and consider each candidate. Rank the top five candidates (in order of your preference) who you feel are the most qualified to represent the OpenMRS implementer community on the Board of Directors. Use the ballot at the bottom of the page to rank your candidates and click the "Done" button to submit your ballot. Only one ballot is allowed per user.

Read more about the community board member election & process.

Candidates

Maurice Barasa

Maurice Barasa works as a Regional eHealth Specialist with the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) at the MDG Centre for East and Southern Africa. His focus is to support the implementation and integration of OpenMRS and Childcount+ (an sms based intervention focusing on reducing child mortality and improving maternal health) in the Millennium Villages within the East and Southern Africa region. Hi area of interest is the use of electronic health record systems (EHRs) to improve health service delivery. His background in Statistics (Statistical Computing) and he aims to use his knowledge to improve the use of EHRs use in evidence-based planning and decision making.

OpenMRS Work

Currently the Millennium Villages is scaling on its implementation of OpenMRS and integrating ChildCount+ as a tool to collect community health workers data, and his role is to support the technical support to the sites on the set up the OpenMRS system and integrating the ChildCount+ data . He also supports the MVP sites in identifying gaps in the implementation of OpenMRS, budget and plan for the implementation and in utilization of the OpenMRS data for report generation.

Indrajit Bhattacharya

Professor Indrajit Bhattacharya is implementing programme in Management of Healthcare Information Technology at International Institute of Health Management Research (IIHMR), New Delhi. He is a Fellow of Institute of Electronics And Telecommunication Engineers (IETE), Life Member of Indian Association for Medical Informatics (IAMI), International Society of Urban Health(ISUH) and Computer Society of India (CSI). He has rich industry experience of over 20 years in the field of healthcare as well as Information Technology. In the area of Healthcare he has worked with industry leaders such as SIEMENS , WIPRO-GE in the fields of Medical Engineering. In the area of IT he has served as ERP Consultant at Infotech Global India and as Additional Director at DOEACC Society under Department of Information Technology. Govt. of India. He is a Member of Task force for Standardization of Electronic Medical Records for Hospitals in India nominated by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of India. Besides, he is a Member of International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) and Programme Committee Member of International Conference of Services in emerging markets at Indian School of Business (ISB) by Service Research Innovation Institute (SRII). He has planned and delivered Management Development programmes for World Health Organisation (WHO) and Indian Orthopedic Association (IOA) in Health Management Information Systems at IIHMR. He has several publications to his credit besides international journals such as Emerald Journal and Asian Journal Of Distance Education. He has executed consultancy project “consultation and software training roadmap development in Thailand” on behalf of Govt. of India. He has implemented online Certificate course in Project Management (CIPM) for Healthcare professionals , certification approved by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI), Govt. of India. He has worked on assignments to USA, Europe, South East Asia and Middle East in the past. He is PhD. (Human Resource Development in Healthcare IT- under completion), B.Tech (Electronics & Communication) and MBA in IT systems.

OpenMRS Work

I am implementing OpenMRS training in the Post Graduate curriculum of 'Management of Healthcare IT' that I am running in my current institution at IIHMR, New Delhi.

Joaquin Blaya

Joaquin Blaya was born in Chile, lived in the U.S. for 23 years, and is currently living back in Chile. He received his M.S. at MIT working in the field of rehabilitation and robotics. Afterwards, realizing that he wanted to work in Latin America and in low resource setting, he began to work with Partners In Health (PIH) and received his Ph.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) implementing information systems in the National Tuberculosis (TB) Program in Peru. He led a team that was the first to show that a handheld system reduced delays in communicating laboratory results from 30 to 7.7 days, prevented 57% of errors, and increased efficiency by 72%. He led a second team in implementing a web-based system in over 250 health centers and showing it decreased errors by 87%, delays by 40%, and that patients stopped transmitting drug-resistant TB 20% earlier. He is currently a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, a moderator of the Global Health Delivery Project Health IT community of practice (www.ghdonline.org), and co-founder of eHealth Systems, a Chilean company providing eHealth strategies and open source solutions including OpenMRS in developing countries.

OpenMRS Work

I did my PhD at Partners In Health, one of the co-founders of OpenMRS, and so I’ve been familiar with the community since its inception. I’ve co-organized two Open Source Health Informatics meetings in Latin America and the Caribbean (IMeCA, www.informaticamedica-lac.org), where OpenMRS has been a key component for all three tracks (decision makers, implementers and developers). The first one was in Lima, Peru in 2009 and this year’s will be at the end of November in Nicaragua. I also participated in the Bellagio eHealth Meeting organized by the Rockefeller Foundation. Finally, I’ve created a start-up in Chile, eHealth Systems, to use OpenMRS and several open source mobile clients in the Chilean and Latin American health sectors. The objective of this company is to design, implement, and maintain open source health information systems and to provide analytics to improve the processes and efficiency of the organizations using those systems. This is part of a vision to foment non-profit and for-profit organizations that provide services around OpenMRS and for which we have begun conversations to create an “OpenMRS Service Provider Cooperative” worldwide.

Gerry Douglas

Gerry Douglas is the founder and board chair of Baobab Health Trust (www.baobabhealth.org), a Malawi-based nonprofit organization aimed at improving healthcare in the developing world through medical informatics. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, Master's degree in Information Science and PhD in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Pittsburgh (Dissertation title: Engineering an EMR system in the developing world: necessity is the mother of invention). Informatics solutions developed by Baobab Health have to date touched more than 1.3 million patients in Malawi. Gerry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh (www.dbmi.pitt.edu) where he was recently appointed to be Director of the Center for Health Informatics for the Underserved, a newly established Center to address the challenges of delivering healthcare in low-resource settings through health informatics, both nationally within the United states as well as internationally. Gerry sits on the advisory council of Inveneo Inc., and is member of the inaugural group of Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) Fellows (2009).

OpenMRS Work
Between 2001 and 2006 weBoabab Health used a locally-developed database schema for the EMR work we were doing at Baobab in Malawi. In 2006 we decided to switch to the OpenMRS data model. This move significantly reduced the time we were spending on maintaining and modifying our schema, freeing-up more time for us to focus on our point-of-care user interface design. A description of how OpenMRS is incorporated into Baobab's EMR HIV EMR can be see at: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000319 In my new capacity with University of Pittsburgh I shall be collaborating closely with Dr. Richard Boyce and Dr. Jeremy Espinio addressing informatics challenges in low-resource settings. Richard has two years of experience developing web services for OpenMRS. Jeremy and his colleagues use OpenMRS as the basis for the Phoenix case detection system for real-time outbreak detection created at the University of Pittsburgh.

Adesina Iluyemiu

Dr Adesina Iluyemi is an executive member and a co-chair of the Global Health Commission of the NEPAD Council, a non-profit voluntary organization. He has engaged with major international multilateral, bilateral, public and private organizations such as the WHO, UN, I TU, Vodafone, BT, WWRF, GSM A, Commonwealth Secretariat, mHealth Alliance, the African Union to mention a few. He is a dental surgeon with postgraduate qualifications from the Royal College of Surgeons, University of London and Chartered Management Institute all in England. He is a Fellow and Council member Telemed & eHealth Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, England. Notable and recent contributions include the UN/Vodafone Foundation report on mHealth in Developing Countries and to the European Technology Platform SRA on eMobility. He also actively participated to the United Nation ESOSOC meeting on eHealth in Africa held Accra Ghana in June 2009. He is an Observer to ITU Q142/2 eHealth WG and a member of the International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth and it’s Nigerian National Chapter. He is an invited expert to the W3C Mobile Web for Development. He was recently made an Associate Member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, England. A PhD on eHealth innovation policy and sustainability is due in 2010. I am currently working with the Africa Union to develop its eHealth Policy.

OpenMRS Work
Adesina is an avid supporter of Open Source software for eHealth in Africa and has been part of the OpenMRS movement since 2007. He has been on the mailing list since then. He made the first case for the development of mobile interfaces and applications for OpenMRS through a presentation at the Implementers meeting in Cape Town, 2007. This culminated in the setting up of the first mobile Working Group. Since then, I have been following progress across Africa and India. Currently, as the co-founder and an Executive Director of MODISE (www.modeise.org), an initiative currently working to employ OpenMRS for developing a connected medical diagnostics system for Global Health solutions.

Daniel Kayiwa

I was studying Bachelor of Science (Mathematics, Economics, Psychology) at Makerere University in Uganda. For the last five years I was working at Faculty of Computing & IT Makerere University. My skills were designing forms, managing concept dictionary, and creating reports.

OpenMRS Work

Developed a module for doing Ministry of Health reports and others for some three sites using OpenMRS in Uganda. Developed the xforms module.

Aamir Khan

Aamir Khan is an epidemiologist based in Karachi, Pakistan. He trained in medicine at the Aga Khan University and in public health at the Johns Hopkins University, where he is associate faculty. He is the founder and Executive Director of IRD since 2004, a research enterprise committed to improving global health and development through the use of appropriate technologies. Aamir also directs the Indus Hospital Research Center in Karachi. In addition to his work in Pakistan, Aamir has led large-scale surveys and established research studies in Tajikistan, the United States, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil over the past 15 years.

Aamir is co-founder of the Innovations in International Health (IIH) program based at the D-Lab at MIT and is a founding member of the openXdata.org association. He is a co-investigator on the OMEVAC (open source mobile data collection for vaccine trials) and mVAC (mobile innovations in recording child vaccination and health data in immunization registers) grants based at the University of Bergen. IRD’s in-house mobile phone system (Interactive Alerts for Childhood Pneumonia) is a winning entry in the Design Triennial at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, on display till January 2011.

Aamir serves as Chair of the Stop TB Partnership Working Group on MDR-TB based at the World Health Organization in Geneva and helped draft Pakistan’s successful USD 173 million Global Fund application for scaling up MDR-TB control

Aamir works with the Interactive team that has redesigned the Indus Hospital Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) for implementation on a distributed network at 44 veteran's hospital in Pakistan.

OpenMRS Work

IRD's work on OpenMRS is centered primarily around the MDR-TB module for the management of drug resistant tuberculosis patients. IRD was one of the first sites to deploy the MDR-TB module as part of the Indus Hospital MDR-TB program run out of Karachi, Pakistan. In addition to deployment, we have contributed code to the module as well. IRD has also adapted the OpenMRS mobile application for use in mobile directly observed therapy (DOT). As part of this pilot, selected MDR-TB treatment supporters carry cell phones with them and report observations from patients' homes during DOTS visits. These observations are automatically stored as part of the patient record in OpenMRS. Additionally, IRD personnel have done an assessment in Nepal with a view to an OpenMRS MDR-TB recording and reporting deployment for their National TB Program. This assessment will be followed by a proposed nationwide OpenMRS MDR-TB module implementation in Nepal. In his role as Chair of the MDR-TB Working Group of the Stop TB Partnership, Aamir is leading efforts to develop programmatic guidelines for adoption of electronic medical records and mobile health solutions to be used to support the global scale-up of MDR-TB control, which is expected to cost between USD 1.1-1.7 billion annually over the between 2011-15.

Aamir works closely with the Indus Hospital informatics team which has begun to plan and design an OpenMRS module for Surgical Care (inpatient and out-patient) from early 2011 onwards.

John K. Lelei

I am the data manager at the AMPATH Centre in Kenya. I have a cross-cutting background with a BSC in Textile Engineering, two diplomas, one for computer applications and the other for computer engineering, and a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree that I earned at Moi University in Kenya. During my time at the Rift Valley Technical Training Institute, I served as a computer applications tutor. From 2004 to 2006, I was the assistant data manager of the USAID-AMPATH Partnership.

OpenMRS Work
I am the Data Manager in charge of data collection and operations at the AMPATH program which is a USAID funded project in Kenya. The AMPATH program is one of the first users of OpenMRS and has over 80 data staff. My duties are to ensure the smooth running of data collection and data entry into OpenMRS. I work very closely with my personnel to detect any bugs in the system and forward to our programmers. I also deal with routine problems arising from both at site and offsite data entry. I have worked with OpenMRS since February 2006.

Howard Marano

My name is Howard T. Marano. I am currently a Senior Key Expert & Lead Architect at Siemens Medical Solution Health Services, and have 26 years of experience in the design of software applications supporting the health care industry in North American and European markets. During this time, I led the design and development of “Best in KLAS” applications, including Novius Radiology System (RIS) and Novius Laboratory Information System (LIS). I am a senior architect and key contributor to the design and development of the Soarian Clinical Systems. I collaborate with multiple development sites and hundreds of programmers, analysts, and domain experts to ensureglobal consistency of our clinical product. My contributions to the product development and implementation have included application architecture, development processes, and deployment to customers around the world. My expertise includes the implementation of the application utilizing healthcare industry standards including DICOM, HL7 & and CDA. I have extensive experience in deploying web-based applications that support customers utilizing a cloud-like topology. I enjoy working with customers and development staff to ensure the delivery of consistent and reliable products that stand the test of time. As a member of the board of directors, I can provide strategic direction that will facilitate a consistent and sustainable healthcare product to resource constrained environments.

OpenMRS Work
My introduction to OpenMRS came with the departure of one of my Siemens' colleagues, Andrew Chi, who joined a team overseeing the implementation of OpenMRS in South Africa. He has shared his experiences and the mission of OpenMRS with me. I've been looking for an opportunity to take my skills and apply them to help others in need and this ideal fit.

Gabou Mendy

Doctor of Medicine (MD), University of Virginia; Master of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (MPHTM) and residency in General Preventive Medicine, Tulane University. Over 25 years experience in providing community-based primary medical care to urban populations through specialty areas of HIV Medicine, Community Medicine, General Preventive Medicine and Emergency Medicine. Extensive leadership capacity in program implementation, clinical oversight and administrative/managerial operations related to HIV care, health education and international technical assistance. Currently Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Maryland-School of Medicine, Institute of Human Virology (2007 – present) Country Medical Director, Senior Technical Advisor AIDSRelief, PEPFAR; Haiti, (2007-2009) Director, Office of Clinical and Community Program - Institute of Human Virology, Nigeria-ACTION; Nigeria (2009 – present)

OpenMRS Work

A novice to OpenMRS Community. Limited experience working with OpenMRS but familiar with it during my tour of duty in Haiti (“Zanmi Lasante“- Partners In Health and Hôpital Albert Schweitzer (HAS). Our program is yet to implement OpenMRS but currently developing a framework of various open source infrastructure with OpenMRS as significant backbone; partnered with Cell-Life (South Africa) to increase the availability, accessibility, and effectiveness of our health information and services. Regional volunteer for OpenMRS to facilitate the capacity building opportunities within the West Africa region and further the community that is slowly emerging.

Gilbert Simiyu

I attended Moi Unviersity and completed a B.S. in Forestry Resource Management and a Master of Science in Soil Science. I came into the IT field through hands on experience – now at 10 years – with IT planning, designing, implementation of information and analytical solutions, and facilitating both research and corporate growth. Currently serving as a Research Data Manger with IeDEA in East Africa, I have developed expertise in data management, statistical analysis, monitoring and evaluation, relational database management, and systems design with management. Each week I assemble PCs, install OS and applications on new computers, and troubleshoot systems, hardware, and software. I also serve as a liaison with the IeDEA IT team and we work together to set up networks to ensure the availability of shared resources at different levels.

OpenMRS Work
I began working with OpenMRS in 2006 while working with AMPATH in Eldoret, Kenya. I used to to clean and the data and provide harmonization between the IeDEA sites. I provided OpenMRS implementation support by following up with IeDEA sites to ensure we have a functional IT infrastructure (i.e. PCs are virus free, support of a functional network, and UPS). I also ensured timely resolution of emerging issues and facilitate inter-site meetings for individuals to share their experiences, expertise and identify specific site needs such as training.

Ballot

The voting period is now closed.

Voting FAQ

Who can vote? Any member of the OpenMRS community with an ?OpenMRS ID can vote.

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For any additional questions, please contact @Dawn Seymour.