2021 Community Board Member Candidates

Get to know our 2021 candidates! Read their statements below.

Candidates

Table of Contents

Who can vote? Any member of the OpenMRS community with an OpenMRS Talk/Slack ID who has been active in the last two years will be sent a ballot and can vote.

Who will see my results? All submitted ballots remain anonymous. Only the final result of which nominee received the most votes will be made public.

How many ballots can I submit? Each individual who votes may only submit one ballot.

Candidates

Christine Gichuki

Hello,

I am humbled for being nominated to take up the community seat of the OpenMRS Board of Directors. To many of you, I am the person who leads the planning of the Annual conferences as the Global event’s manager for 4+years. To others, we are colleagues who have worked together to set up the OpenMRS QA framework as the QA lead and finally to others, we work together in ensuring there are capacity building initiatives in the community. These are just some of the roles I play, but furthermore who is Christine and what can she bring to the table as a Board of Directors is the question I plan to answer you below;

Christine is a bold , intelligent, driven and passionate individual who loves the space of digital health. I have been part of the community for almost a decade where I started off helping with the planning and participating at the 2013 OpenMRS Impelementers Meeting. It was at this meeting that I knew I wanted to be part of the community and build my career around digital health. Since then, I have strategically looked for opportunities that allow me to work closely with the community and OpenMRS implementations.

Apart from my community roles, I take on projects that revolve around OpenMRS which provide me with first-hand experience of what is happening on the ground. In this space, I get to put on my implementer hat and work with stakeholders and health care workers on the ground. My joy at the end of the day comes from hearing from users how patient care has become efficient due to use of health information systems or the generation of reports by the click of a button. Some of the implementations I have worked with over years include KenyaEMR, UgandaEMR, Mozambique, Bahmni Community among others.

OpenMRS community does not only provide technical solutions and save lives but is also a family. Over the years, I have met and formed bonds with communities members who I call friends and always look forward to the next annual meeting where we get to see each other and have fun.

I ask for your support in representing you on the OpenMRS Board of Directors where I aim to represent your voices as a dedicated community member and as an on-ground implementer. One of the other key things I would like to drive is empowering the ladies within the community to step up and take up more roles in the community by setting up space where we can share and learn from each other’s experiences.

It will be an honour to serve you.

Gibril Gomez

I am a Health Informatics specialist with extensive experience working in the Information and Communication Technology industry. I’m an Expert in eHealth and mHealth systems, Electronic Health Records Frameworks e.g OpenMRS, Web and mobile apps, and Database development. For almost 12 years, I have worked as an IT professional in large and diversified global corporations. I have led several teams, including initiatives to integrate IT strategies across countries. I am adopting a comprehensive strategy to provide market and consumer information services on the use and implementation of digital health systems.

My name is Gibril Gomez, and I work at Public Health Information, Surveillance, Solutions, and Systems (PHIS3) as the Director of Health Informatics. I oversee the sub region's largest EMR system adopted from the OpenMRS and institutionalized as NigeriaMRS, with over 4,052,512 patients ever registered and 1,042,399 patients currently active on treatment in 19 of Nigeria's 36 states with all NigeriaMRS data feeding into Nigeria’s National Data Repository (NDR).

Being an OpenMRS pioneer in Nigeria since 2011 comes with a wealth of experience and involvement in dialogues with stakeholders such as Government of Nigeria (GoN) agencies, National Aids Control Agency (NACA), National AIDS and STDs Control Programme (NASCP), Implementing Partners (IPs) and others. I have played key roles in the development of systems and have provided leadership to great innovative projects such as OpenMRS community pharmacy application, OpenMRS retrospective systems, NigeriaMRS Point-of-Care (PoC), NigeriaMRS - LIMS exchange, Commodity management, National Client, and Facility Registry, NigeriaMRS Mobile, NigeriaMRS and NDR exchange, just to name a few.

'Type it once!' is my mantra. If information already exists in a single system, let us connect to it to simplify processes and decrease anomalies while offering access to information to help business decisions. I am honored to have been nominated as the community representative on the OpenMRS Board of Directors sit. If chosen by the community, I will continue to serve and provide the necessary and required contributions to the community on behalf of OpenMRS. I will be an effective community representative on the board and support the innovative transformation to further expand the OpenMRS platform for better healthcare delivery.

Daud Kakumirizi

I am Kakumirizi Daud a professional software engineer with a special interest in the strategic planning, designing, implementation and evaluation of health information systems (HIS) in resource-limited settings. I received a BS in Computer Science majoring in Software Engineering and Application Development, from Bugema University Uganda. I am currently a student pursuing Masters in Software Engineering focusing on Health Informatics with specific interests to utilize technology in improving the effectiveness of digital health implementations. I joined OpenMRS in 2017 as a community developer and currently am a QA Fellow whose work has directed OpenMRS quality assurance in delivering systems that better end user experience.

Jonathan Mpango

Dear friend,

I seek your support to represent you on the OpenMRS Community Board of Directors.

I am Jonathan Mpango, based in Uganda. I have been around OpenMRS since 2015 and the nature of my job in Uganda has given me an opportunity to contribute as an OpenMRS implementer, developer, ambassador and leader.

I was part of the team that established the Uganda OpenMRS community (over 250 active members) and UgandaEMR, the largest OpenMRS implementation (functional in over 1,200 health facilities with retrospective, point of care and mobile data capture features). Since 2016, I have been a member of the Uganda Ministry of Health EMR technical subcommittee, where I have played a major role in advocating for the national-wide adoption and scale-up of UgandaEMR. Over the years, I have participated as a member of the organizing committee for global OpenMRS implementers conferences (2016, 2017, 2018).
In 2018, I designed an OpenMRS short course which was later accepted and included as part of the training curriculum for three (03) Masters programs at the School of Public Health, Makerere University, Uganda (part of the Uganda OpenMRS community sustainability approach). These students are OpenMRS/UgandaEMR future ambassadors and/or implementers. Currently, I serve as the OHRI product manager for the University of California San Francisco, University of Nairobi and Makerere University Consortium under CDC-HQ Technical Assistance Project (TAP) grant. As OHRI product manager, my role is to lead the design and implementation of an OpenMRS HIV reference application (utilizes OpenMRS 3.0); an application that will be adopted by any PEPFAR supported country.

I would like to bring this experience and commitment to the board if given an opportunity by you to sit at the board. I would focus on strengthening OpenMRS at local levels (which is key for the sustainability of OpenMRS), and strengthening the communication between the Board and the local communities.