April is known as a month of “firsts” – the first flowers of the year bloom, the first days of warmer weather and the first baseball game of the year is played. April 2022 also saw a first for CSTE as it hosted its first Preventative Medicine Fellow, Dr. Hariharan (Hari) Athreya. 

Concurrently with his CSTE Fellowship, Dr. Athreya is finishing up a Fellowship in Preventative Medicine at Emory University. He’s passionate about providing global and community health and addressing health inequities. During his time at CSTE, he graciously sat down for an interview.

Q: Was there a certain “a-ha” moment where you became passionate about Public Health as a career?

A: If I had to pick one, it would be my experience with AmeriCorps during college. I saw that if I cared about social determinants of health and where people were living and how they were living like I was doing … then I would need a public health degree. But to be able to do that I think coupling that with a medical degree would offer the most ability to leverage my skillset and my interest in science. That experience showed me the importance of community health and trying to understand where people are living before just trying to fix them when they come to clinics, and I think that really showed me the importance of public health.

Q: Describe wanting to branch out beyond a traditional medical education to include public health?

A: Early in my medical education I was having a hard time grasping how little it allowed us to be out in the community and understand what was going on with our patients. And I think that medical education can sometimes be siloed in that we don't really understand the context of what we're giving or the context of the people that we're trying to help. And I remember in our medical school I think we only had one half-hour session on what public health meant and didn't feel like that was enough.

I started a program, GoodEats, that raised awareness of how social determinants of health affect clinical outcomes. It was born out of an attempt to help teach fellow medical students and myself about social determinants of health and how that was not just only affecting the patients in our community that came to see us, but how that was impacting our own ability to function as students and learners and be able to be present for our patients.

Q: What’s an average day like for you? 

A: My day to day varies a lot. With CSTE, there's a lot of information to absorb and that's been great. I attend a couple different group meetings daily and then sometimes ad hoc events come up, for instance today there is a White House briefing on the new data modernization initiative.

So, the day is usually sprinkled with three or four meetings and then trying to work on projects that I've been assigned to, that's both continuing projects with CSTE and sometimes projects that have been ongoing. Right now, I'm working on a project around screening for opioid use disorder in primary care clinics, working on a paper on air quality standards and how that affects preventative medicine physicians, doing different data analysis projects for the Georgia Department of Public Health.

Q: What programs or areas of CSTE’s work have interested you the most during your Fellowship?

A: I just sat in on a meeting with the health equity division of CSTE and I think that’s the most interesting [area] to me right now. And then informatics, i.e., the work that Annie Fine (CSTE’s Chief Science and Surveillance Officer) is doing around data modernization and why it's important. There is a balance necessary in trying to improve data systems that will be key for the future. It seems that working on the very local level right now, data is such a challenge to deal with. The questions around how to handle it moving forward is very interesting.

Q: Managing burnout has become a major issue for all health care workers. What have you learned, especially during the pandemic, that has helped you?

A: I think everybody who worked in direct patient care got burned out at some point during COVID, and it's how you pick yourself up from that. For me it was a lot of just trusting or being able to talk to the people around you, and share your experiences, and share your frustrations, and then together kind of resolve to find a better way to do it next time.

I think the answer to that question is one, making sure that you have people you can talk to and be open and vulnerable with when you do feel burned out or low, and then moving on to try to build a better public health infrastructure to avoid feeling burned out in the first place.

Dr. Hari Athreya is preventative medicine fellow at Emory University School of Medicine. He served as CSTE’s first preventative medicine resident in Spring 2022.