The care teams at our PFF Care Center Network (CCN) sites are made up of many different healthcare professionals, each with an important role to play in running the center and caring for patients. To help you understand how your care team works, we’ll be starting a series of posts to help you get to know some of the members of the pulmonary fibrosis (PF) care team. We’ll do this by highlighting team members from Care Center Network sites across the country and letting you tag along with them as they go about their day. Follow us on Facebook or Instagram to get a peek into their daily routines on the job! 

• Tell us your name, credentials, and medical center.

Amy Hajari Case, MD – Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, GA. I’m the CCN site director and Medical Director for Pulmonary and Critical Care Research.

• How did you get started in your field and/or what you are passionate about with your work?

My interest in pulmonary medicine actually started with critical care, which is part of a paired fellowship. During my fellowship, I worked with a wonderful mentor, Dr. Joao de Andrade, who taught me how to care for interstitial lung disease (ILD) patients and introduced me to clinical research.

• What does a typical day or week look like for you?

I wear a lot of different clinical “hats,” and I usually wear each one for about a week at a time: ILD clinic, inpatient pulmonary medicine, and critical care medicine. When I’m in clinic, I’m generally seeing patients all day, for both new consultations and follow up visits. For new patients especially, there is a lot of information to review, including records from other doctors and testing like CT scans or biopsy results. Between patients and at the end of the day, I answer messages from our nurses and therapists and write my clinic notes in our computer record system.

When I work in the hospital, either on the acute care floors or in the ICU, I spend the day seeing patients, talking with families, rounding with our interdisciplinary team, and doing even more charting! I usually end up seeing patients in all parts of the hospital and put a lot of miles on my shoes each day.

I also attend lots of meetings during the week, including our multidisciplinary team meeting where we review ILD cases with our pathologist and radiologists. In my role as Senior Medical Advisor at the PFF, I meet with the Programs team and Medical team weekly and other committees throughout the month.

• What is your favorite part of your job?

My clinical research hat is my favorite one. There is so much still to learn about PF and ILD and how we can better treat these diseases, so I feel like every contribution our team can make to the science is valuable.

My other favorite thing is the work I do in education and advocacy for the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation. PF and ILD can be really confusing, even for doctors, and many people haven’t heard of these disease states at the time they are diagnosed. I feel really privileged to be able to help educate our community and communicate important information.

• What you like to do in your free time?

My most favorite thing in the world is spending time with my family, ideally at the beach! I also love live music and theatre and have really missed being able to see shows during the pandemic.