Public Health Informatics
(2 weeks short course in collaboration with University of Washington) September 2008
Name of Instructor
Sherrilynne Fuller
Sherri Fuller is Co-Director, Center for Public Health Informatics; Professor, Biomedical and Health Informatics, School of Medicine ; Professor (Adjunct) Health Services, School of Public Health and Community Medicine; Professor, Information School; all at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, Washington. She served as the founding head of the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics, School of Medicine, UW and has led several large-scale campus and regional research and development projects in the areas of biomedical informatics, telemedicine and information technology. Fuller has served as co-director of the NIH Fogarty International Center-funded AMAUTA Global Health Informatics Training program for the past eight years and has worked extensively with faculty and administrators at leading universities in Peru to develop library and information resources, health informatics research and training programs as well as campus research infrastructure. Fuller has done research, lectured and consulted throughout the world on the development of libraries and of health information systems for low resource environments and on the creation of academic programs in biomedical and health informatics. She served as a member of the US President\'s (White House) Information Technology Advisory Committee 1997-2002; as a member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health and is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Fuller chaired the Steering Committee for PHI2007: Creating a Global Partnership in Public Health Informatics and is currently leading planning for the development of the Global Partners in Public Health Informatics, an international partnership governmental and non-governmental organizations, academic institutions and corporations dedicated to addressing health challenges in low-resource settings through appropriate application of information and communications technologies.
Thomas Payne
Dr. Payne attended Stanford University, the University of Washington School of Medicine, completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Colorado, and spent two years at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Harvard Medical Informatics Fellowship program. He led the installation of the Veterans Administration CPRS electronic medical record at VA Puget Sound in Seattle between 1997 and 2000, for which VA Puget Sound was awarded the 2000 Nicholas E. Davies CPR Recognition Award. He is currently Medical Director of UW Medicine IT Services, serving University of Washington Medical Center, Harborview Medical Center, and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. He has served as a member of the Advisory Group to the Leapfrog Group/First Consulting Group project on Computer-based Physician Order Entry, is on the Editorial Board for Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American College of Physicians, coordinator of decision support activities for the American Medical Informatics Association, and has served as a board member of the Washington HIMSS chapter. He is Attending Physician in Medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center and Harborview Medical Center.
Chris Seebregts, The Medical Research Council
Professor Chris Seebregts is a Senior Manager in Biomedical Informatics within the e-Health Research and Innovation Platform at the South African Medical Research Council, an honorary associate professor in computer science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal consultant for Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation and a founder of Jembi, a South African NGO implementing open eHealth and information systems in Africa. He has postgraduate degrees in medical biochemistry, computer science and software engineering and has worked both in the public and private sectors in biomedical and informatics research, information technology management and software development. He is part of the leadership of the OpenMRS consortium and principal investigator of the Open Architectures, Standards and Information Systems for healthcare in developing countries and Free State Intervention on HIV Resistance and Sustaining Treatment projects. His main areas of interest are the design and development of health information systems, open enterprise eHealth architecture, biomedical informatics, and HIV/AIDS treatment
Eric D. Rasmussen, InSTEDD
Dr. Eric Rasmussen arrived as President and Chief Executive Officer of InSTEDD in October 2007. Until selected as CEO of InSTEDD, Dr. Rasmussen was both Chairman of the Department of Medicine within Naval Hospital Bremerton near Seattle, Washington, and an advisor in humanitarian informatics for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense. He holds academic positions at several institutions and has been a Principal Investigator for both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and for the National Science Foundation. He sits on several advisory boards, including the Crisis Management Resources Board for the National Academy of Sciences and the US Crisis Response Working Group. He has a number of publications and has been awarded several personal, unit, and theater military decorations, including a Presidential Legion of Merit. Beginning around age 17, Dr. Rasmussen spent seven years enlisted in nuclear submarines before leaving the Navy to receive his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. After graduate work in molecular biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory and teaching in Haiti, he completed a Residency in Internal Medicine and re-entered the Navy as Chief Resident in Medicine at the Navy Medical Center in Oakland, California. Subsequent Navy positions included three years as Fleet Surgeon for the US Navy’s Third Fleet. Dr. Rasmussen, with an additional European Master’s Degree in Disaster Medicine, served on the Afghanistan humanitarian support planning staff within US Central Command Headquarters (CENTCOM) in 2002, and later as a physician to the Iraq Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) for the Iraq War in 2002-2003. As a member of the DART, he served within the International Humanitarian Operations Center in Kuwait and was later selected for the DARPA 2003 'Sustained Excellence in a Principal Investigator' award. Further work as Director of the Strong Angel series of international humanitarian support demonstrations led to work in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2007, and in Indonesia as head of a Civil-Military Coordination Team for the tsunami response in Banda Aceh in early 2005. Later in 2005, he deployed with Joint Task Force Katrina in New Orleans, coordinating a small portion of the relief response after Hurricane Katrina. In addition to his responsibilities at InSTEDD, he currently serves as Permanent Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Forum on Water Disasters, as a member of the US Congressional Task Force on Global Biosurveillance, and as a member of Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva. Eric lives on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, and has been married for more than 25 years to Demi.
Nicolas di Tada, InSTEDD
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Nicolas is a software developer and project manager with a strong background in scientific and technical applications of software crafting. Prior to starting his company, Manas Technology Solutions, Nicol?s spent 10 years as a software architect and project leader for a diverse range of organizations, including startups and large corporations, acquiring a varied background in information retrieval, machine learning, information visualization and web development. Passionate about the possibilities of the convergence between technology, science and art, Nicol?s provides consulting services that help organizations build state of the art software solutions with a strong emphasis in usability and user friendliness. Nicolas is currently working to incorporate these areas into the InSTEDD collaboration platform for health and humanitarian scenarios.
Eduardo Jezierski, InSTEDD
Eduardo Jezierski has spent his whole career designing, implementing and deploying software solutions on a global scale. He originally received an MsC in Informatics after initial work in nuclear engineering, and later worked in Argentina in the areas of GIS analysis, machine learning and modeling for anthropology challenges. His Master’s thesis was on robotics control, genetic algorithms and neural networks. He spent nine years in software development at Microsoft, first supporting largest enterprise customers, then later as Program Manager and Solutions Architect. He was one of the founders of a team dedicated to building software assets (tools, practices, frameworks, services, content and information architectures) to improve quality and productivity of Microsoft’s business customers. The usage of these assets and frameworks climbed at its inception from zero to more than a million developers worldwide and adoption in excess of 80% of the target market – including financial, healthcare, military and manufacturing customers. Ed also developed a strategy for building communities consisting of academia, software vendors, other technical partners, customers and grassroots participants by initiating a new SharedSource approach for engineering at Microsoft. There are now more than 25,000 registered members and hundreds of thousands of lines of source code shared between the participants, while still maintaining acceptable IP protection for Microsoft and other members. A practitioner of agile software-design approaches, he has built and led numerous global teams in producing mission-critical assets in just months, and has presented on software architectures and design approaches for large distributed systems in conferences around the globe. Most recent development arenas include transactional and analytics systems, software systems integration, scalable web services and user interface design. He helped found a team at Microsoft dedicated to starting new businesses by providing an internal venture capital model and growing innovation practices and entrepreneurship in the company, working directly with the staff of the Chief Software Architect. He contributed to defining strategy and early execution of the new group and delivered prototypes in the domain of mesh architectures, real-time communications and immersive web environments for long-tail retail. Several of these prototypes were designed, written and validated in the field in collaboration with Microsoft’s Humanitarian Systems Group.
Herman Tolentino, Centers for Disease Control
Dr. Herman Tolentino is the Director of the Public Health Informatics Fellowship Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). After completing the CDC informatics fellowship in 2006, he became the first graduate of the fellowship program to serve as its Director since it was established in 1996. A physician and anesthesiologist by training from the University of the Philippines in Manila, he began his interest in computers as a medical student in the 1980s. After completing his anesthesia residency, he assumed the post of Chief Information Officer of the university teaching hospital and facilitated the movement of the teaching hospital into the information age. While practicing and teaching anesthesia he was instrumental in developing a novel SMS-based mobile phone surveillance system to track critical events in the operating room. With his increasing involvement in the use of computers for health care he was awarded a fellowship in medical informatics at the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington in 1997 through a grant from the U.S. Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates and trained under the mentorship of Dr. Sherrilynne Fuller. vBefore coming to CDC, he was involved with a project to integrate notifiable disease surveillance systems in the Mekong Basin in collaboration with the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office and the Rockefeller Foundation. During that time he also helped in the promotion and development of health informatics in the Asia Pacific region through his participation in the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI) and his leadership of the Philippine Medical Informatics Society. While based in Manila, he helped develop the first graduate, two-track (bioinformatics and medical informatics) program in health informatics in the Philippines. While transitioning from medical practice to informatics, he spent two years working on innovative and award-winning web development projects in the I.T. industry including the first mobilebased application in the country. In 2004, with a small, joint R&D grant from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Development Research Center from Canada (IDRC), he conceptualized and developed the six-year old community-based health information system called the CHITS Project (www.chits.ph) while working in city health centers to bring better integrated primary care to the urban poor. This system integrates public health vertical programs at the community level and has been recognized for its unique approach to capacity building and sustainability. For his innovative approach in implementing information systems for the benefit of underserved communities, Dr. Tolentino has received recognition for excellence in the practice of information technology in health at the prestigious Stockholm Challenge in 2005. While a fellow at CDC, he collaborated with the National Library of Medicine and ProMEDMail in the development of EpiSPIDER (www.epispider.net) an innovative application that tracks emerging infectious diseases and disasters through the Internet. Because of this contribution, he is considered a pioneer in the field of automated, Internet-based event-based disease surveillance. While wearing his workforce development hat at CDC, he leads the development of innovative approaches to applied learning in public health informatics and works with fellows and partners to address informatics challenges facing domestic and international public health agencies. He is an active member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) and teaches public health informatics as Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Public Health, University of Illinois in Chicago. His interests include natural language processing.
David Masuda
Dr. Masuda holds joint appointments in the UW Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He teaches courses in health informatics and health information technology in several graduate programs, focusing on leadership, management and socio-technical issues. His administrative responsibilities include leading the UW Biomedical and Health Informatics Certificate Program, and developing healthcare information technology industry relationships and career opportunities for graduate students in the various informatics training programs.
Karl Brown, The Rockefeller Foundation
Karl Brown joined the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006. As Associate Director of Applied Technology, Brown is focused on the application of information technology to the programmatic work of the foundation. He is working on exploring and nurturing imaginative uses of technology by Rockefeller grantees, and improving collaboration and knowledge management within the Foundation. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Brown worked as the Chief Technical Officer of GNVC, an NGO that fostered entrepreneurship in Ghana. Previously, Brown was a technical team lead with Trilogy, where he developed and deployed enterprise systems and consumer-facing websites for Fortune 500 companies such as Ford and Nissan. Brown received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.