There’s a moment that shows up in each of these three stories, though it looks different every time. For Rufeda Ali, it was a woman handing her a prescription she couldn’t afford at a CVS pharmacy counter. For Deborah Moyo Daniels, it was watching her brother struggle through physical therapy after an ACL tear and thinking of elderly adults living with arthritis and no real path to treatment. For Anoop Dhillon-Rai, it was years of consulting other people’s healthcare organizations and slowly realizing she wanted to build something of her own.
Three different moments. Three different countries of focus — the United States, Nigeria, and Canada. Three different ventures. But all three women trace their ability to act on that moment back to the same place: the University of Washington’s Health Informatics and Health Information Management (HIHIM) programs.
None of them set out to become entrepreneurs when they enrolled. What they got instead was a technical vocabulary for problems they already understood in their bones — problems they’d witnessed at pharmacy counters, in hospital rehab rooms, in fragmented health systems on two continents. HIHIM gave them the systems-level fluency to see why those problems existed, and eventually, the confidence to build the fix themselves.
Finding the program, finding the fit
For all the differences in their paths to HIHIM, each woman describes arriving at the program the same way: not as a first choice made lightly, but as the answer to a question she’d been asking for years.
Ali came to health informatics sideways. Before UW, she worked as a pharmacy technician at CVS and Cardinal Health, and later as a medical assistant at a Texas clinic. From both sides of the counter, she kept watching the same failure repeat itself: uninsured patients couldn’t find resources that already existed for them. “I did not know what health informatics was when I first encountered that problem,” she says. “But when I discovered the field, I immediately recognized it as the technical discipline that could solve what I had witnessed firsthand.” What sold her on UW specifically was its precision. The Bachelor of Science in Health Informatics and Health Information Management (HIHIM) program, she says, isn’t a general health administration degree — it trains students in the actual data systems that govern healthcare: ICD-10, HCPCS, HIPAA architecture, and federal API structures. “That specificity is what I needed.”
Dhillon-Rai’s route was more direct, shaped by a family steeped in clinical care. Her mother and sisters are nurses; her father was a health inspector, her brother-in-law, a dentist. She knew she wanted to work in health but wanted a different lens on it than the one her family already had. She found the UW program at the right time and in the right format — an accelerated, executive-style evening schedule that fits a working life and a cohort of peers already established in their careers. She later earned a Master of Health Informatics as well, deepening both her technical grounding and her professional network.
Moyo Daniels’ path started in public health. After finishing her undergraduate degree in Global Health at UW and spending time working at Neighborhood House, she knew she wanted a master’s degree but wasn’t sure in what — until friends and family, hearing her talk through what she wanted out of a career, pointed her toward HIHIM. She looked at programs elsewhere but chose to stay at UW, partly for family and community ties, and partly because of the legwork she put in before enrolling: messaging alumni, talking to advisors, even sitting in on a full class of second-year students to understand exactly what she’d be getting into. “It was checking boxes,” she says of the decision. What she found, she says, was “the perfect intersection of health care and impact” — a way to combine her interest in systems with her drive to make a tangible difference.
Different entry points, same conclusion: this was a program built at the intersection of clinical understanding and technical capability, training students to not only manage healthcare data, but to understand what that data is for.
Rufeda Ali: Building the front door that never existed
Rufeda Ali graduated from UW’s HIHIM bachelor’s program in May 2023, selected by faculty as Gonfaloniere — the School of Public Health’s honor for its most distinguished graduate. Today she works full-time at Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing towards Content Marketing in Seattle for Amazon Builder Center. In April 2026, working nights and weekends around that full-time job, she built and launched CareMap Health as a solo founder.
CareMap Health is a free, bilingual, AI-powered healthcare navigation platform that searches five live federal databases simultaneously to connect uninsured and underinsured Americans with free and low-cost clinics, prescription assistance programs, and behavioral health resources. In its first 23 days, with zero paid advertising, it reached users in 23 states.
The idea traces directly back to that moment at the pharmacy counter — a patient who couldn’t afford her prescription, and a manufacturer’s assistance program Ali knew existed but couldn’t surface fast enough. “She left without her prescription,” Ali says. “I watched that happen repeatedly.” The scale of the gap is stark: roughly 65% of uninsured adults in the U.S. don’t know that free or low-cost care resources exist for them, despite billions of federal dollars invested in safety-net infrastructure — Federally Qualified Health Centers, SAMHSA behavioral health facilities, Ryan White program sites, patient assistance programs. That infrastructure exists. What’s missing, Ali says, is a single patient-facing front door to all of it. “CareMap Health is that front door.”
Her HIHIM training shows up in nearly every design decision. She credits her capstone advisor, Carrie Kaelin, with permanently shifting how she thinks about the field — not as data management for its own sake, but as information systems built to move people toward outcomes. That framework was reinforced in the platform’s build itself: one of the earliest and most significant pivots was making the product bilingual from day one rather than English-first with translation added later. Once Ali saw that the Hispanic adult uninsurance rate, at 24.6%, was the highest of any demographic group nationally, she rebuilt the entire interface for full English-Spanish parity before launch — a requirement, not an afterthought.
What has surprised her most is how quickly institutional trust builds when the work itself is real. She cold-emailed the president of NeedyMeds — the country’s largest patient assistance organization, covering more than 40,000 programs — the week CareMap Health launched, and had a response, and two signed agreements, within days. “The challenge is not convincing people the problem matters,” she says. “The challenge is building something real enough that they believe you can solve it.”
Her ambition for CareMap Health is specific and time-bound: she wants every uninsured patient in the country to be able to find free care within 60 seconds of opening their phone — not a list of links, but a ranked, distance-sorted, bilingual set of real options. Asked what she’s proudest of, she doesn’t point to a pitch deck or a fundraising round. “I built it. Not planned it, not pitched it — built it and launched it nationally… a platform I designed, coded, integrated, and deployed alone, in 23 days, while working full-time.”
Anoop Dhillon-Rai: Giving Canada a national front door for mental health
Anoop Dhillon-Rai graduated from UW’s HIHIM bachelor’s program in 2014 and later completed the Master of Health Informatics as well. Her career since has spanned large-scale health system implementations, data governance work, and writing RFP responses for state health plans — first at a boutique consulting firm supporting radiology companies’ PACS and RIS systems, then years at Accenture, and now as an independent consultant. Alongside that consulting practice, she runs GoodTherapist, a national virtual mental health platform for Canada.
The venture grew out of a gap she kept encountering in her own life and in her consulting work: unlike the U.S., where a name like BetterHelp comes to mind instantly for online therapy, Canada has no single trusted national platform for mental health care — just a patchwork of small, siloed clinics scattered across the provinces. “We wanted to build something for Canadians, by Canadians,” she says: a platform that could match clients with the right practitioner, handle booking and secure video, and manage billing, freeing clinicians to focus purely on care instead of running their own back office.
One of the earliest and most consequential pivots was about balance of control. Dhillon-Rai and her partner had to decide how much autonomy to give individual practitioners versus how much to standardize for a consistent national experience. They landed on a model where clinicians keep control of their clinical approach while the platform owns the operational backbone — a shift from their original concept, and one that came directly from Dhillon-Rai’s years of watching large-scale health system implementations succeed or fail based on exactly that kind of workflow design.
She’s candid that entrepreneurship wasn’t part of her original plan. “I never really saw entrepreneurship on the table for me growing up,” she says. “I expected to climb the corporate ladder, and I thought I’d climb it far.” What surprised her most about the leap wasn’t the idea itself, but the risk tolerance it demanded: “I expected the hard part to be the idea. It turned out to be the leap itself.” She’s proud of taking that risk, including leaving something as stable as a role at Accenture behind.
Her hope for GoodTherapist goes beyond access alone. She wants it to help chip away at the stigma still attached to seeking mental health care in Canada — to make therapy, in her words, “a celebrated part of Canadian life, not something that has to feel hidden.” With several major partnerships in progress, she’s currently splitting her focus between scaling the platform and continuing independent consulting work in health informatics.
Deborah Moyo Daniels: Rebuilding rehab access
Deborah Moyo Daniels came to UW’s Master of HIHIM program from an undergraduate degree in Global Health, and today works as a Foundation Specialist at Virginia Mason, supporting annual funds, operations, events, and data reporting. In March, before she’d even officially finished her coursework, she began building Open Doors Access (ODA) — an AI-powered physical therapy and rehabilitation platform initially designed for vulnerable populations in Nigeria. It went live at the end of May.
The idea came from watching her brother recover from a torn ACL. “The surgery was maybe 10% of it,” she says. “The second part was just watching him do rehab and struggle with the exercises” — physically and mentally. That experience collided with something she’d been carrying for years: thoughts of her grandmother back in Nigeria, living with arthritis, where ongoing care can be treated as a luxury rather than a given. “I just started thinking about all the problems back home I’ve been trying to solve,” she says. “Can I build something? What can I do to help solve this problem?”
She built the platform herself — teaching herself Figma from scratch, since she doesn’t have an engineering background, and reaching out directly to physiotherapists in Nigeria to understand where the real gaps were. Users fill out a form describing their condition, timeline, and mobility goals; ODA generates a personalized exercise plan, complete with instructional video and a computer-vision feature that watches the user through their camera and corrects their form in real time. The platform operates on three tiers: free for patients to use the AI-generated program, free for physiotherapists to access and monitor patients, and a paid tier for people who want a physical therapist to personally review and adjust their plan.
Her original vision was bigger — a broader app covering more ground — but she learned quickly that she needed to narrow her focus to one problem and build it well, and that user behavior couldn’t be assumed to transfer across contexts. “There’s a very big difference in users in the United States versus users in Nigeria,” she says. Her test case became her own mother: if her mother could sign up and understand the app, Moyo Daniels knew she was on the right track.
Two courses from the HIHIM curriculum stand out to her as foundational to how she built ODA: a healthcare privacy and security course with John Hartgraves, and a law, policy, and ethics course with Debra Primeau that pushed her to think critically about the difference between what technology should do and what it could do. Both showed up directly in the platform’s design. “Privacy and security are not an afterthought — it’s the main part of it,” she says. “People kind of understand we’re not keeping your data, your data is not being distributed. It’s safe.” Earning that trust, especially around an AI-powered tool, remains one of her central focuses.
What’s surprised her most isn’t the technical build — it’s the depth of learning required to meet users where they are: teaching herself to code a feature she’d never built before, walking patients through login issues one at a time, and studying how nonprofit incorporation and interoperability work differently inside Nigeria’s health system. Her hope is straightforward and personal: that transportation and cost barriers stop being reasons someone doesn’t get care they deserve, and that one grandmother, somewhere, gets to walk again without shame or isolation. “If I can help just one person,” she says, “if one grandma feels comfortable walking and carrying their grandchild — that’s really what motivates me.”
What the Program Gave Them
Ask any of the three what the UW HIHIM programs did for them, and none of them describe a checklist of software skills. They describe a way of seeing.
Ali calls it a framework for thinking about information as infrastructure — data not as something to store and retrieve, but as a system that either connects people to what they need or fails them. Dhillon-Rai points to the practical muscle of understanding user workflow design and backend architecture well enough to know what holds up at scale, paired with a network of relationships that opened doors throughout her career. Moyo Daniels traces her instincts on privacy, ethics, and trust-building directly back to specific courses and professors — and credits a mentor’s repeated emphasis on servant leadership with shaping how she thinks about solving problems for people who shouldn’t have to struggle in the first place.
All three also point to something less technical and harder to teach: permission. Ali’s advice to current students is to get comfortable being the least experienced person in the room, because “the discomfort teaches you how to use [frameworks] when the stakes are real.” Dhillon-Rai’s advice is to explore the entrepreneurial path earlier than she did, and to understand that there’s a whole landscape of opportunity outside climbing a corporate ladder. Moyo Daniels’ advice to her former self is simpler still: breathe, stay consistent, and don’t assume an idea isn’t worth trying.
None of these three women enrolled in an HIHIM program planning to launch a company. What they found instead was a discipline built for people who notice a broken system and want the technical fluency to actually fix it — whether that system is a pharmacy counter in Texas, a rehab clinic in Nigeria, or the patchwork of mental health care across Canada. For prospective students who see themselves in that same instinct — who keep noticing the gap between the care people need and the care they can actually reach — Ali, Dhillon-Rai, and Moyo Daniels are proof of what that instinct can become, with the right training behind it.