Welcome New Board Members
Health Impact Ohio Welcome’s New Board Members
By: Brittany Daniels, Director of Communications & Operations, Health Impact Ohio
Health Impact Ohio is excited to announce the appointments of two new members to our Board of Directors. The organization is welcoming Reem H. Aly, ESQ, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Groundwork Ohio, and Adjunct Instructor in the College of Public Health at The Ohio State University; and Dr. Ayaz Hyder, Assistant Professor in the College of Public Health, and Core Faculty in the Translational Data Analytics Institute at The Ohio State University.
This announcement underscores Health Impact Ohio’s commitment to enter 2022 with a more determined focus on improving social drivers of health, health equity, healthcare access and quality for all individuals in every community. The organization has been committed to seeking out new, diverse thought leaders in our community to address local and state health and healthcare issues in a more comprehensive, equitable manner. We sought guidance from our Board of Directors, community partners, and Health Impact Ohio leadership to find new board members whose goals, expertise, and interests align with our mission and vision.
Aly currently serves as the Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Groundwork Ohio; an organization that works to educate key decision makers in Ohio about the importance of quality, early learning, and health development as the most transformative strategy to increase the life-long success of Ohio’s children and lay a strong foundation for economic prosperity in the state. In her role as Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, Aly provides organizational leadership, oversees the development and implementation of Groundwork’s Centers of Excellence including the Center for Family Voice, the Center for Maternal and Young Child Health, and the Center for Early Learning, and spearheads the organization’s data, equity, and accountability efforts. Aly also serves as an adjunct faculty member at The Ohio State University in the College of Public Health who holds a Juris Doctorate and Master of Health Administration, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from The Ohio State University.
“Health Impact Ohio is excited to welcome Reem Aly to the board and engage the unique perspective she brings around early childhood learning and health development, maternal and young child health, health value data, and healthcare policy, along with her project proven commitment to health equity” stated Dan Paoletti, President, Board of Directors, Health Impact Ohio.
Prior to joining Groundwork Ohio, Aly served as Vice President of Policy and in-house legal counsel at the Health Policy Institute of Ohio (HPIO), where she led efforts to provide Ohio policy makers and health stakeholders with high quality, objective information that was relevant to their policy decisions, with a particular focus on health equity, maternal and child health, and the intersections of the healthcare system and population health. She also co-led the development of HPIO’s Health Value Dashboard, a tool to track Ohio’s progress towards health value. Additionally, Aly worked as a Consultant and Administrative Resident at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and has legal experience working at the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) and Bricker & Eckler, LLC.
Hyder is an Assistant Professor in the College of Public Health and Core Faculty in the Translational Data Analytics Institute at The Ohio State University. He has experience building research and data collection infrastructure with a diverse group of traditional and nontraditional Central Ohio public health partners, including those focused on health equity, COVID-19 school-based surveillance, addiction prevention and treatment, and food systems. Dr. Hyder is also skilled at identifying stakeholder needs for data-informed decision making and meeting those needs in cooperative ways.
Prior to serving as Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University, Dr. Hyder was a Research Associate at the University of Toronto and completed Postdoctoral training at Yale University. He also holds his PhD in Biology from McGill University and obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biology from McMaster University. His current areas of research and study include COVID-19, Systems Science, Agent-Based Modeling, Birth Outcomes/Infant Mortality, Environmental Epidemiology, Air Pollution, Citizen Science, Opioid epidemic, Food insecurity, Smart Cities, and Health Economics.
Health Impact Ohio has been working with Dr. Hyder in his role at The Ohio State University College of Public Health for several years. In our shared passion for using data for public health impact and decision making, we have had the opportunity to collaborate on several public health centered projects, integrating social determinant of health (SDOH) data with more traditional health data to foster real change and improvement in access to quality preventative health care.
In March 2021, Dr. Hyder rapidly developed the current version of the Equity Mapping Tool (EMT) and worked with Central Ohio partners to operationalize it within their daily workflows with Community Health Worker (CHW) deployment and engagement strategy. Working with the state health department and local health departments (LHDs) and health systems, Dr. Hyder has been the driving force behind creating equitable vaccine access for marginalized populations in Central Ohio. He has been a true partner in collaborating with Health Impact Ohio to incorporate our SDOH data to drive decisions around community health efforts in the COVID-19 pandemic. So much so, that our collaboration grew into a funding opportunity from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to spread and scale the EMT, which has been successfully piloted in Franklin County Public Health at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to Pathways Community HUBs (PCHs) across the state. He will also work to train CHWs in participating HUBs and LHDs on how to use the EMT in day-to-day delivery of services and in support of the COVID-19 public health response; and to discover new uses for the mapping tool by identifying and developing case studies from specific HUBs and disseminating those case studies more widely across all participating CHWs, HUBs and LHDs in Ohio.
“Dr. Hyder’s willingness and eagerness to collaborate and share his expertise in data-driven equity promotion made asking him to join our board an obvious one. The way he and his team work to address the issues facing marginalized communities in Ohio connects directly to our mission at Health Impact Ohio: optimal health outcomes for all people in every community through community engagement and data collection and integration, as well as strategy development and deployment. Having his unique perspective to inform and make that mission actionable will be vital to our organization. We look forward to his perspective becoming an integral part of our board discussion and decision making for years to come” shared Paoletti.
As we look forward to the collective impact Health Impact Ohio, our board, staff, and community partners will strive to achieve in 2022, we would also like to acknowledge our board members who retired from Health Impact Ohio’s Board of Directors in 2021. On behalf of Health Impact Ohio’s Board and Staff, thank you to Doug Anderson, Thomas Hadley, and Bruce Wall for your service, support, and contributions given to Health Impact Ohio and Ohio communities throughout your term. We are grateful for your shared knowledge and experiences that enriched our organization and helped lead us to where we are today.
To learn more about Reem and her work, see her bio at Groundwork Ohio.
To learn more about Ayaz and his work, see his bio at The Ohio State University.
