The Digital Initiatives Group at I-TECH (DIGI) brings together individuals with a breadth of experience and skills in digital health. DIGI has researchers, digital health specialists, health workforce specialists, data analysts, and software engineers who are deployed on projects in a flexible and responsive way. DIGI also has access to a global network of staff, consultants, and vendors.
DIGI employs a shared faculty lead role to help leverage diverse resources from departments across the University of Washington.
Faculty Lead
Technical Staff
- Beth Dunbar, Senior Digital Health Specialist
- Yao He, HIS Evaluation Specialist
- Casey Iiams-Hauser, Senior Digital Health Specialist & OpenELIS Global Product Owner
- Piotr Mankowski, Senior Interoperability Engineer
Consultants
- Cliff Gita, HIS Software Engineer
- Moses Mutesasira, Senior Digital Health Software Engineer
- Herbert Yiga, HIS Software Engineer
Program & Administrative Support
- Mallory Erickson, Global Financial Analyst
- Brynn McKinney, Program Operations Specialist – DIGI
- Sonora Stampfly, Senior Program Manager – TAP Program
DIGI Faculty
Jan Flowers
DIGI Faculty Co-Lead
Jan Flowers, MS is a Clinical Faculty member and Research Scientist in the University of Washington (UW) School of Nursing, and is faculty co-lead of the Digital Initiatives Group at I-TECH (DIGI). Her area of focus is on innovative strategies and technologies for healthcare systems strengthening in resource constrained settings through appropriate electronic collection and use of quality health data for evidence-based decision making. She has led informatics organizations and teams for over 20 years, focused on technology policy and law, health information systems evaluation and maturity modeling, open source communities of practice building, health technology engineering and implementation, patient centered technologies and mHealth, and standards-based interoperability for improved care at the point of service, surveillance, and program monitoring.
Ms. Flowers serves on the board of directors for both OpenMRS and OpenELIS Foundations, and the founder of the OpenHIE Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Community of Practice, which develops and shares common standards and best practices amongst the open-source LIS community. She holds an MS in Health Law & Policy from the University of California San Francisco jointly with UC Hastings Law School, and a BS in Psychology from the UW. For more about Jan Flowers, please see her full profile.
DIGI Technical Staff
Beth Dunbar
Senior Digital Health Specialist, DIGI
Beth Dunbar, MPH, MSc is a Senior Digital Health and Evaluation Expert for DIGI and PhD student in Human Centered Design and Engineering at the UW, where she studies design and evaluation of health information systems. She is focused on implementation research that supports scaling and costing digital health systems. She recently led a project to develop the protocol on gathering global baseline requirements for HIV Care electronic health records (EHR) systems, as part of the Digital Systems Assessment Tool (DSAT). The protocol is based on input from a variety of health, informatics, and digital global goods experts, reviewing literature, and synthesizing artifacts across several key stakeholders. She earned her MSc in Human Centered Design & Engineering from UW and holds an MPH from Johns Hopkins University.
Yao He
HIS Evaluation Specialist, DIGI
Yao He, PhD, MPH is a Research Assistant for DIGI and PhD student in Global Health Implementation Science at UW. Her research focuses on evaluating the impact and process of digital health project implementation using routinely collected data. Dr. He’s recent projects include evaluating the effectiveness and identifying the facilitators and barriers of OpenELIS project implementation in Côte d’Ivoire; establishing a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework for digital health for pandemic preparedness and response; compiling functional requirements for laboratory information management systems as part of the Digital Systems Assessment Tool (DSAT); and drafting data privacy and confidentiality guidance for integrating data systems.
Prior to joining DIGI, Yao worked as research assistant at Health Alliance International on routine M&E of a PEPFAR project in Côte d’Ivoire and as teaching assistant at the University of Washington for graduate and undergraduate level global health courses. She also worked as project manager and M&E lead of maternal and newborn health projects in rural China at Save the Children. Dr. He received her PhD in Global Health Implementation Science from the UW and her MPH in Health Policy and Management from Columbia University.
Casey Iiams-Hauser
Senior Digital Health Specialist, DIGI & Product Owner – OpenELIS Global
Casey Iiams-Hauser, MIA is a Senior Digital Health Specialist with DIGI and is the product owner for the OpenELIS Global Lab Information System (LIS) project and a co-lead for the OpenHIE LIS community of practice. He has spent his career working in resource-limited settings architecting standards-based health information systems and providing technical assistance to Ministries of Health and local partners. He specializes in helping transition laboratory systems from paper based, or bespoke one-off systems into interconnected national lab information networks, with connections to dashboards for turning data into timely information, and results reporting to EMR systems, epidemic monitoring and patient tracing systems, and other platforms.
Mr. Iiams-Hauser has served as lead architect for national LIS deployments for Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritius, working closely with local partners and ministries to build robust deployments with appropriate technological solutions and a well-trained workforce to build sustainable informatics systems implemented at scale. He holds his Master of International Affairs from Columbia University.
Piotr Mankowski
Senior Interoperability Engineer, DIGI
Piotr Mankowski is the lead architect and interoperability expert for the DIGI team. He has over 10 years of experience developing healthcare systems, standards-based interoperability, and working with clinical data. He is currently pursuing a PhD in biomedical informatics with a focus on innovative methods for designing, implementing, and validating health system architectures to enable secure, scalable, and performant sharing of data between various components of a health system network. Since 2019, Piotr has supported work on interoperability for health systems in Haiti and has contributed to the development of standards-based solutions for providing continuity of care, patient identity services, and lab order communication between electronic medical record and lab information systems. Piotr actively collaborates with the OpenMRS, OpenELIS, OpenHIE, and IHE communities, and is currently working with these communities on modern, standard-driven approaches for quality and conformance testing of FHIR specifications and implementation guides. He earned his BSc from McGill University in Montreal, where he double majored in Computer Science and Biology.
DIGI Consultants
Cliff Gita
HIS Software Engineer
Cliff Gita is an HIS Software Engineer consultant for DIGI. Clif has experience in OpenMRS, OpenELIS, mHealth (e.g., two-way texting), and data pipelines. He has contributed software development work on OpenMRS since 2019 and has experience in html form entry, web services, attachment, reporting, and FHIR2 modules. Additionally, Cliff was the release manager of the OpenMRS Platform 2.4.0, was a co-administrator of the Google Summer of Docs 2020, and participated as an OpenMRS development fellow extracting longitudinal patient-level data from OpenMRS through OpenHIM to a shared server for calculating PEPFAR indicators. He has worked on the HSIS reporting work for iSante-Plus Haiti EMR and currently contributing to the Jamaican mHealth project. Cliff holds a bachelor’s degree in business computing from Makerere University.
Moses Mutesasira
Senior Digital Health Software Engineer
Moses Mutesasira is a Systems Engineer consultant for DIGI focused on the development of the OpenELIS Global LIS, building EMRs based on OpenMRS, integrating HIS products based on OpenHIE architecture using the FHIR Standard, and developing automated testing frameworks for HIS products against specified criteria. Moses worked with OpenMRS on the Patient Level Indicator Project, a proof of concept to demonstrate extraction of large amount of data from OpenMRS and send it to a shared health record, allowing the data to be used by downstream reporting tools.
He also worked on several OpenMRS consultancy projects with several organizations including IntelliSOFT Consulting Ltd., Uganda Cancer Institute, Emory University School of Medicine. Moses holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and management from Kyambogo University.
Herbert Yiga
HIS Software Engineer
Herbert Yiga is an HIS systems engineer consultant with DIGI focused on developing healthcare systems that use standard-based interoperability. He also focuses on developing automated testing frameworks. Herbert actively collaborates with the OpenMRS, OpenELIS and OpenHIE communities, is an OpenMRS volunteer, and has developed a module that uses machine learning to predict which patients are most likely to experience interruption in treatment in Mozambique. Herbert holds a bachelor’s degree in information Technology and Computing at Kyambogo University in Uganda.
DIGI Program & Administrative Support
Mallory Erickson
Global Financial Analyst, I-TECH
Mallory Erickson, MBA is an administrator for DIGI, and a Global Financial Analyst for the International Training & Education Center for Health. She has extensive experience working with international programs, with five years on the ground in Nicaragua and seven years supporting University of Washington programs in Cambodia, Mozambique, Namibia, Peru and Ukraine. Ms. Erickson holds an MBA from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University. She speaks Spanish and Portuguese.
Brynn McKinney
Program Operations Specialist, DIGI
Brynn McKinney manages the operational and financial health of DIGI. Serving as the primary point of contact for business development, contract administration, budget management, financial reporting, recruiting and logistics. Brynn stays ahead of policy changes within the University and ensures compliance with Washington State laws. She has 15 years of experience in organizational capacity development within the public sector and has previously worked for King County Treasury, The Montana Department of Justice – Office of Consumer Protection, The Montana Department of Revenue, and the University of Montana.
Sonora Stampfly
Senior Program Manager, TAP Program
Sonora Stampfly, MPH is a Program Manager with the I-TECH center and oversees the CDC funded Technical Assistance Platform (TAP) portfolio as a PATH consortium member. Ms. Stampfly oversees budget management and reporting for this award, including budget development across projects, assuring compliance with funder requirements and coordination with subrecipients on spending and forecasted costs. Previously, Sonora coordinated NIH funded research training grants on HIV, HPV, and NCDs with partners in Kenya and Nepal. She also supported global health leadership training programs within the Department of Global Health at UW. She received her MPH from UW.