Dr. Fiks is a leader in pediatric, primary care practice-based research, directing two of the most impactful laboratories for the study of pediatric primary care, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) national Pediatric Research in Office Settings (PROS) network and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Pediatric Research Consortium (PeRC).

His seminal contributions to medical informatics and medical decision making have informed and impacted electronic health record (EHR) pediatric clinical care, research and policy nationally in three areas: (1) Demonstrating ability of EHR-based clinical decision support to increase childhood vaccination through primary care, contributing to childhood vaccine support becoming a ‘required’ aspect of pediatric EHRs; (2) Using a novel, clustered RCT, testing the ability of increasingly common portals to improve asthma outcomes, creating a model for health system portal use to improve chronic illness outcomes; (3) Through a series of studies, creatively utilizing a range of methodological approaches (secondary data, cohort and intervention studies) to assess EHR data, nationally advancing pediatric practice, including vaccination, ADHD care, and outpatient antibiotic stewardship.

Dr. Fiks has developed innovative approaches and infrastructure to maximize research impact. To conduct his vaccination studies, he and colleagues created a customizable decision support system to test its impact on routine childhood, influenza and adolescent vaccinations, including HPV (the latter recognized as an NCI Research-Tested Intervention Program). To study the impact of a shared decision making portal in pediatric chronic illness, he led a team that designed and evaluated what proved to be an impactful portal. Working with colleagues at the AAP and elsewhere, Dr. Fiks oversaw the creation of the Collaborative Electronic Reporting through Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER²) Consortium that, among other results, demonstrated lack of recognition of hypertension in pediatric primary care, a finding that informed and influenced national guidelines and was featured by NICHD for its importance.