Membership in the Steering Committee is primarily based on regional representation providing an opportunity for multiple countries to standardize support given. The OpenHIE Steering Committee’s mission is to provide fundamental guidance around community priorities and areas of emphasis to OpenHIE’s Operational Leadership Team which supports and guides overall daily operations and direction for the community driven on real world experiences. This “strategic” leadership will help to inform strategies, roadmaps, and future plans for the OpenHIE community.
Open Seats: Currently, the OpenHIE Steering Committee has two open seats for representation in the Americas.
Inaugural Members
East Africa
Andrew Likaka, MBBS, MPH
Dr. Andrew Likaka is a medical doctor with postgraduate studies in Public Health, serving as the Director of the Quality Management and Digital Health Directorate in the Ministry of Health and Population in Malawi. He is responsible for providing strategic leadership and coordination of quality of care and digitalization in the health sector. He has led the process of establishing the Quality Management Directorate in the Ministry of Health in Malawi. Dr. Likaka is an Improvement Advisor (IHI) and a Global Health Specialist (University of Melbourne, Australia). He has expertise in health program design, implementation, and evaluation. He has been appointed to head the Digital Health Division in the Ministry of Health and Population, with an aim of championing the digitalization of the health sector as part of the government sectoral-wide reforms for efficiency.
He has worked in various capacities from a Medical Officer, Senior Medical Officer, Chief Medical Officer, District Medical Officer, and District Health Officer in different Districts in Malawi. Dr. Likaka has facilitated development of various health policies and strategies. He is a National Coordinator of the Malawi Health Situation Room which is advancing data usage for strategic decision making through virtualization at all levels. Dr. Likaka is the Chair of the National Quality Commission for Health Systems in Malawi and has spent most of his career setting up new systems and developing policies to improve quality of health services in Malawi and SADC Region. He is a keynote speaker in many international quality conferences and leads the Global Network for Improving Quality of Care for mothers, newborns, children, adolescents, and youth, supported by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is the Principal Investigator of KUUNIKA Data for Action Project in Malawi and a member of OpenHIE.
Dr. Likaka has helped develop National Malaria Policies, Guidelines, and Protocols for Malawi and SADC. He has been part of the Global Fund Grant Writing Team for Malawi since 2007 for HIV, TB, and Malaria proposals. He has provided advisory services to various Malaria Indicator Surveys conducted in Malawi as well as being a member of the Technical Working Group for Malaria. Currently, he is leading to establish a bio-epidemiological platform in Malawi using Covid-19 as a vehicle.
Carol Kamasaka
Ms. Carol Kamasaka is a Ugandan national with 10 years of experience supporting the senior leadership at national and sub-national levels to access and use strategic data for decision making. She has a strong understanding of HIS and digital health having worked collaboratively with various partners. Ms. Kamasaka graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from Makerere University in Uganda and is currently writing her final research thesis for a Masters of Health Informatics degree from the same university.
Ms. Kamasaka is a Digital Health Specialist, a role she has held for the last four years with the Division of Health Information at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. Her roles can be categorized into two: a) core IT infrastructure maintenance; and b) business intelligence, analytics and data governance.
West Africa
Luke Bawo, B.Pharm., MPH, PhD
Since 2011, Dr. Luke Bawo has served as Coordinator for Health Information Systems (HIS), Research, and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) at the National Ministry of Health in Liberia, providing guidance in the development and operationalization of Research, M&E and HIS systems, and leads the development of the National Health Information System & ICT Strategic Plan (2016-2021).
He is presently the National Focal Person for Epi-Surveillance for the Covid-19 response in Liberia. During the West Africa Ebola Outbreak, Dr. Bawa was the National Chairman for Ebola Epi-Surveillance in Liberia and was responsible for coordinating the development and management of multiple data sources, performing real time analysis and interpretation, and providing guidance to help control and manage the Ebola outbreak. Mr. Bawa was also a Subject Matter Expert for Data Management for the joint US/Liberia clinical research initiative, Partnership for Research on Ebola Vaccine in Liberia (PREVAIL), funded by the National Institute for Health (NIH).
South East Asia
Vajira H. W. Dissanayake MBBS (Colombo), PhD (Nottingham), FNASSL, FIAHSI
Prof. Vajira H. W. Dissanayake is the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. A medical geneticist by training, he is also the Chair and Senior Professor of Anatomy, the Director of the Human Genetics Unit, and the Chair of the Specialty Board in Biomedical Informatics at the University. He was the President of the Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA) in 2012 and the President of the Commonwealth Medical Association (CMA) from 2016 to 2019. He is the Chairman of the Commonwealth Center for Digital Health (CWCDH), the Vice President of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), and the President of the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI). He is an executive board member of the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative (G2MC). He was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka (NASSL) in 2013 and a fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) in 2020. He was conferred the Sri Lankan national titular honour of 'Vidya Jayothi' for scientific achievement in 2019.
Boonchai Kijsanayotin, MD, PhD, FIAHIS, FRCP(T)
Dr. Boonchai Kijsanayotin is the Chair of the Asian eHealth Information Network (AeHIN). The AeHIN promotes better use of information communication technology to achieve better health through peer-to-peer assistance and knowledge sharing and learning through a regional approach for greater country-level impacts across South and Southeast Asia. He is a member of WHO Digital Health Technical Advisory Group (DHTAG), the vice president of the Thai Medical Informatics Association (TMI), and an International Academy of Health Informatics and Sciences (IAHIS) fellow of International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). Dr. Boonchai is an informatician and physician from Thailand. He worked in a rural public general hospital for 15 years as an internal medicine clinician before receiving a Masters and Ph.D. in Health Informatics from University of Minnesota, USA. His working areas and research interests are national health information standards and interoperability, health information exchanges, national eHealth strategy, and health IT adoption. He is the senior research manager of the Thai Health Information Standards Development Center (THIS), Health System Research Institute (HSRI), Ministry of Public Health, and biomedical and health informatics lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University Thailand.