Alex Fiks, MD, MSCE

Dr. Fiks, the Director of the Possibilities Project, is a primary care pediatrician, a Professor of Pediatrics and holds a Distinguished Endowed Chair in the Department of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and 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, often 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 overseen the creation of 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 >1.5 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 (DBHi), and faculty in PolicyLab.