About the Team

Ann Goldman-Hawes (MPH, 1996, George Washington University; PhD, 2018, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands), on staff at the George Washington Milken Institute of Public Health Department of Epidemiology for over two decades, is involved with the Department of Epidemiology’s practice and PhD in Epidemiology programs, as well as the team science module of the Children’s National – GW Clinical and Translational Science Institute. She coordinated the Project for Ascertainment of the Estimated Excess Mortality from Hurricane Maria and led the study’s assessment of death certification and registration processes in Puerto Rico. Currently, she is co-investigator and coordinator of the National Construction Safety Team (NCST) Hurricane Maria Investigation’s Deaths and Injuries Project to better understand how damaged buildings and supporting infrastructure played a role in the injuries and deaths associated with Hurricane Maria.

Ms. Goldman-Hawes has over 15 years of public health field experience in economic evaluations of primary health care intervention strategies, specifically, national neglected tropical disease elimination programs and community oral health promotion trials in vulnerable communities in low income countries. This includes her PhD research on the cost-effectiveness of prevention programs for better oral health outcomes for children in the poor underserved rural communities in Brazil and in China.

Joseph B. Hawes MD, MPH, President/C.E.O and founder of Fusion Health Solutions, Washington, DC.

Dr. Hawes is a physician with public health training who has been providing medical and public health care services since 1980. Dr. Hawes obtained a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MB.BS) at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica in1980. He became a Master of Public Health in Administrative Medicine at The George Washington University in 1996. During his career, Dr. Hawes has successfully designed and implemented innovative ways for maximizing the use of available resources in resource strapped settings, allowing for increased provision of care at the individual and population level.

For ten years Dr. Hawes worked as a clinician providing medical care service in both hospital and private practice settings in Jamaica providing preventive, curative, and rehabilitative medical care services. Dr. Hawes worked as a medical officer at the Kingston Public Hospital, the major public hospital on the island, as well as at the National Chest Hospital, the only facility that provides care for TB patients. As a private practitioner in a rural community, Dr. Hawes organized the existing public health nurse practitioner led clinic services into a triage system that allowed all members of the community to have access to his services (curative and preventive). During his tenure as Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the Director of Health Care Services for Montserrat, a United Kingdom Territory island in the Caribbean Dr. Hawes combined his clinical and public health practice experience to reconstruct the island’s health care system following devastation from a volcanic eruption, which had previously destroyed two thirds of the island. Dr. Hawes also served as a consultant analyzing opportunities for synergy between agricultural and educational group initiatives to improve health outcomes relating to maternal-child care in Ethiopia.

In the 1990’s, Dr. Hawes worked with CDC MCH epidemiologists and the MCH team at the state of South Carolina Health Department. He assisted in the development and implementation of a pregnancy related enhanced mortality surveillance system (PREMSS) methodology, which resulted in an 80% improvement in the identification of pregnancy related deaths in the state of South Carolina. This PREMSS approach still remains the premier methodology for identification of pregnancy related deaths across the US.

As the technical consultant to the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation national Turning Point three-year community health systems development initiative, Dr. Hawes advised 41 communities (including large, metropolitan, urban as well as rural communities) on matters pertaining to the use of public health data in generating information for planning and decision making. Dr. Hawes coordinated the efforts of local health departments and community organizations, including faith-based organizations.

In 2010 Dr. Hawes, through funding from his Fusion Health Solutions, used the lessons learned from his accumulative clinical and public health care practice experiences to implement a pilot health and well-being promotion project with a rural district of a rural Native American Indian (NAI) reservation. The aim was to build the district’s technical and organizational capacity building skills. The goal was to enhance the district’s capacity to understand the importance of data for policy, program and service delivery, decision making process – and to promote organizational capacity building through collaborative partnership development.

A 2012 Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF) outbreak on the Reservation would provide Dr. Hawes the opportunity to work with the district in applying their skill building lessons learned in in their management of the outbreak. The unique outputs, outcomes and successes achieved by this rural NAI district brought Dr. Hawes to the awareness and realization that if provided with the right skills and attributes rural, resource strapped communities are capable of representing the needs of the community and for ensuring that available resources are equitably distributed among all families and children within the community – commensurate with their needs.

A 2019 analysis, by the FHS team , on the outputs, outcomes and successes achieved from the 2012 RMSF management effort resulted in the identification of a systematic process that would allow for the well-being promotion and protection success achieved to be adapted and applied to resource strapped communities across the US and in developing countries. This outcome and the value implications of its success for vulnerable communities and individuals provided the foundation for our FHS mission, vision, goal and objectives for the next decade.