line physicians are the “eyes and ears of public health,” and the county health department made efforts to keep physi- cians up to speed about rapidly evolving developments in H1N1 epidemiology, reporting requirements, and clinical care recommendations. “We distilled large volumes of guid- ance from the Centers for Disease Con- trol and Prevention into practical tools
physicians could easily implement in their practices. During the outbreak, our public health physicians valued the con- stant feedback of the medical community, which enabled quick recognition and re- sponse to needs.” From a public health epidemiologist’s standpoint, Dr. Chung says, some of the future local challenges include the need to develop an integrated electronic da-
tabase system, laboratory information management systems, electronic health records, and registries to improve the ef- ficiency of public health surveillance and case management.
Another focus for the department is
investing in the surveillance of “action- able data,” according to Dr. Chung. “We want to measure what matters. In an era of resource reduction, we need to maintain directed efforts toward epi- demiological surveillance of data with practical applications and direct impact on public health practice,” she said.
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Patient advocate Edward J. Septimus, MD, of Houston, is medical director of the Infection Pre- vention and Epidemiology Clinical Ser- vices Group with HCA Holdings Inc., the world’s largest private health care sys- tem. He has served in his current role for three years and is president of the Texas Infectious Diseases Society. Before joining HCA, he held a similar role with Memorial Hermann in Houston for 25 years. He also teaches twice a week in the Department of Internal Medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center. HCA has 163 acute care facilities and
Edward J. Septimus, MD
52 TEXAS MEDICINE March 2012
more than 100 ambulatory sites, and employs nearly 200,000 people in the United States. Dr. Septimus oversees updating HCA facilities on clinical services activities and best practices to promote infectious disease treatment and prevention. That involves a lot of travel and meetings. “I’ll visit a couple of hospitals in a par- ticular HCA division and meet with the local leadership. I may provide continu- ing medical education programs at the division or hospital level, depending on the facilities’ needs. I’m able to get my colleagues engaged in HCA’s clinical programs.” Because he can’t be in several loca- tions at once, his group uses we- binars and other tools to communi- cate with HCA fa- cilities throughout the United States.
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