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Alex Fiks, MD Photo

Dr. Alex Fiks is a primary care pediatrician, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and holds a Distinguished Chair in the Department of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Board certified in clinical informatics, Dr. Fiks’ research is aimed at improving outcomes for ambulatory pediatric patients through practice-based research with a focus on improving health and health care decision-making through health information technology. To achieve these goals, much of Dr. Fiks’ research focused on fostering shared decision making between clinicians and families, especially in the setting of behavioral health conditions. He is also especially interested in how electronic health record data may best be used to improve primary care, medication use and child health more broadly. With the American Academy of Pediatrics Pediatric Research in Office Settings Network, which he directs, Dr. Fiks has been involved in building the Collaborative Electronic Reporting for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER2), an electronic health record database designed to support pharmacoepidemiologic and other comparative effectiveness studies that currently includes >1.2 million US children from across multiple health systems.

Dr. Fiks is also the Medical Director for the Pediatric Research Consortium (PeRC), CHOP's practice-based research network, Associate Director of CHOP’s Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness (CPCE), a founding member of the hospital’s Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics, and faculty in PolicyLab. He actively mentors multiple faculty and academic fellows.

The GIVE Teens Vaccines intervention is flexible and could work within a variety of frameworks. For example, the format of the electronic medical record alerts could be tailored to fit within existing electronic systems, the clinician feedback reports could be delivered electronically rather than through in-person delivery, and the family-focused reminder phone calls could be delivered via an automated system, manually by clinic staff, or potential via text message or email. The research study included adolescent girls only, because the vaccine had not been recommended for all adolescent boys at the time of the study. The program could easily be adapted to include adolescent boys as well, or could be adapted to include young adults who have not received the vaccine and are within the recommended age range.

The use of a shared electronic medical record system across primary care practices in the research network facilitated implementation of the intervention. Potential challenges practitioners may face in implementing a similar program might include difficulties in reaching families with the reminder calls due to wrong numbers and working across different electronic health record platforms to create the vaccine alerts.

To assess short-term outcomes, practitioners may want to focus on assessing the impact of GIVE Teens Vaccines on missed opportunities for vaccination. We would suggest looking at missed opportunities separately for the initial versus subsequent HPV vaccine doses and at acute/chronic care visits separately from preventive visits.

Our research is focused on understanding how best to implement elements of the GIVE Teens Vaccines intervention in order to reduce HPV missed opportunities for vaccination and improve vaccination rates across the United States. More broadly, we are studying how best to use health information technology to improve child health outcomes.
Updated: 03/02/2020 12:18:57