Seehusen named chair of MCG Department of Family Medicine

Dr. Dean Seehusen, a family medicine physician with nearly two decades of experience in academic medicine, has been named chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

He also will be named Georgia Academy of Family Physicians Joseph W. Tollison, MD Distinguished University Chair, pending University System of Georgia Board of Regents approval.

Seehusen has served as interim department chair since the July retirement of longtime chair Dr. Joseph Hobbs. Before being appointed interim, he had served the medical school for two years as associate dean of Graduate Medical Education.

“Dr. Seehusen did an excellent job of helping lead MCG and its teaching hospital, AU Health System’s, more than 50 residency programs,” says Dr. David Hess, MCG Dean. “He has vast experience in academic medicine and I have no doubt that he’ll carry his strong leadership skills over to the Department of Family Medicine and continue the legacy of service created by his predecessors. I am also immensely grateful to 1974 graduate Dr. Hobbs for his more than four decades of advocacy and commitment to primary care and to MCG.”

An honored educator, Seehusen was the 2018 recipient of the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Uniformed Services Academy of Family Medicine and was named a top reviewer, defined among the top 10%, for the Journal of Graduate Medication Education that same year. In 2016, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine gave him the Innovative Program Award for his contributions to the creation of the group’s Council of Academic Faculty Medicine Educational Research Alliance.

He is deputy editor of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, one of the foremost journals in the field, which is relocating its editorial office to MCG. He is editor-in-chief of Priority Updates from the Research Literature Surveillance System, which targets newly published research expected to change family medicine and primary care and generates new evidence-based recommendations for practice, and assistant medical editor for American Family Physician, the journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

He is a member of the Steering Committee and co-chairs the Curriculum Workgroup for the Building Research Capacity Initiative, a joint effort of the North American Primary Care Research Group, the Association of Departments of Family Medicine and the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, to grow research in family medicine. He chairs the Research Committee and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and is a member of the National Journal Club Committee of the American Board of Family Medicine.

Before coming to MCG in 2018, after an honorable discharge from the United States Army, Seehusen had served as director of medical education and designated institutional official at Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center at Fort Gordon, responsible for oversight of the medical center’s five accredited residency programs and ensuring quality education and support for its more than 80 medical residents.

He first began teaching family medicine immediately after completing his residency at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu in 2000, eventually also teaching residents at Madigan Army Medical Center in Washington and Evans Army Community Hospital in Colorado.

From 2010-14 he served as program director for the National Capital Consortium – Family Medicine Residency at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he saw the residency program double in size, move from a 40-bed to a 120-bed hospital and the curriculum completely revised to accommodate those changes. He returned to Eisenhower as chief of the Department of Family and Community Medicine in 2014.

Seehusen earned his medical degree from the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine and his master of public health from the University of Washington.