Dr. Seth Foldy
Seth Foldy, M.D., M.P.H., is the Director of the Public Health Informatics and Technology Program Office at CDC. Dr. Foldy has chaired health informatics committees for the national associations of both local and state health officials, and has served on the boards of the eHealth Initiative, National eHealth Collaborative and the State Alliance for eHealth. He helped form the Joint Public Health Informatics Taskforce, linking several associations to accelerate and harmonize electronic information system development.
In medical practice Dr. Foldy developed patient screening and clinical support tools for occupational, environmental and community health. At the City of Milwaukee he explored public health uses of Regional Emergency Medicine Internets, culminating in a rapidly-deployed four-state system for detecting possible cases of SARS (the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). Dr. Foldy was cofounder and chief medical officer of the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange, which now links 44 hospitals across Wisconsin and helped track in real-time the impact of influenza H1N1. He helped clinicians at Emory University and the CDC develop tools to help assess individuals’ need for medical attention during the influenza H1N1 pandemic. He helped author state health information technology plans in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin and co-chaired the WIRED for Health board that recently completed Wisconsin’s state-level health information exchange plan.
Dr. Foldy holds degrees from Stanford University (BA Human Biology), Case Western Reserve University (MD) and the Medical College of Wisconsin (MPH), is board-certified in Family Medicine and Preventive Medicine, and holds academic appointments at several Wisconsin schools. He was a family physician at the Great Brook Valley Health Center (Worcester MA) from 1985-87; clinic medical director and residency faculty at MetroHealth Medical Center (Cleveland OH) from 1987-96; medical director and then Commissioner of Health for the City of Milwaukee Health Department from 1996-2004; informatics and international public health consultant, professor, and medical director of Health Care for the Homeless of Milwaukee from 2004-2009, and became State Health Officer and Administrator of the Division of Public Health for Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services in January 2009. He was awarded the Milton & Ruth Roemer Prize for Creative Local Public Health Work (Amer. Public Health Association) in 2002 and the Award for Excellence in Information Technology, (Nat. Assoc. County and City Health Officials) in 1999.
