Dr. Leonard founded The Ihangane Project in 2008 as a means of inspiring local health system innovation within existing national health systems to ensure lasting improvements in health outcomes. She has twenty years of clinical experience and has served as both the Director of HIV Quality Management and as Tuberculosis Controller for the County of Santa Cruz, California for over ten years. In this work, she has successfully collaborated with Public Health around HIV and TB care, including program design, management and evaluation, and individual patient care. She has extensive experience as an end-user of electronic medical record systems and serves on the Infectious Disease Review Committee for Epic software use in OCHIN Inc's network of public health facilities throughout the United States.
In Ruli, Rwanda, The Ihangane Project acts as a social innovation laboratory for creating effective and resilient frontline health care delivery systems. Our approach successfully merges the mandates of upstream global health policy makers with community priorities and limitations to ensure lasting positive health outcomes in the homes of families everywhere. Our model provides a mechanism for local innovation within the existing infrastructure and opportunities to provide feedback to policy makers and allow integration of frontline voices into the larger system.