Robert Grundmeier, MD

Robert Grundmeier, MD, joined The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in 1997 as a resident after receiving his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He has since contributed to a variety of endeavors in both clinical practice and biomedical informatics research.

Dr. Grundmeier is currently a primary care attending pediatrician at the Primary Care Center in South Philadelphia, the director of clinical informatics within the Joseph Stokes Jr. Research Institute's Clinical Reporting Unit (CRU) core facility, a key contributing member of the Institute to Transform and Advance Children's Healthcare (iTACH), and a founding faculty member of the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMi).

A key participant in implementing the Hospital's electronic health record (EHR) in 2000, he has since used aggregate clinical data from the EHR for research. In 2001 he received a fellowship from the National Library of Medicine to fund his efforts on EHR-enabled research and has received grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Pew Charitable Trusts to further expand his work. His research activities have included the effectiveness of EHR-mediated asthma care plans and outcomes of immunization alerts during clinical visits.

Dr. Grundmeier was also integral to the development of the Pediatric Research Consortium (PeRC) within Stokes, and he continues to support research interventions within Children's Hospital's extensive healthcare network for PeRC. His knowledge of EHR interface design and the effects of EHR-mediated research intervention help to bridge gaps between clinical research and practice, resulting in increased enrollments for clinical research studies. He collaborates closely with researchers to design enrollment optimization strategies such as that developed for the Randomized Intervention for Children with Vesicoureteral Reflux (RIVUR) project.

By leading the CRU's efforts to deliver interpretable clinical data, Dr. Grundmeier enhances the data resources available to the Stokes research community. Among other CRU activities, his efforts have led to collaborations with the Center for Applied Genomics (CAG) in order to marry genotypic features with relevant clinical endpoints in genome-wide association studies designed to find genetic biomarkers of pediatric diseases.

Through his inquiries, Dr. Grundmeier has concluded that suboptimal data capture during clinical visits is the largest difficulty in using clinical data for research. While improved data capture tools and interfaces – such as those he developed for asthma and immunization-related events – can improve this situation, Dr. Grundmeier has found that they are no substitute for the physicians' awareness of how the data being entered may be used downstream of the clinical visit.

Links and Publications:
Fiks AG, Grundmeier RW, Biggs LM, Localio AR, Alessandrini EA.Impact of clinical alerts within an electronic health record on routine childhood immunization in an urban pediatric population. Pediatrics. 2007 Oct;120(4):707-14.

Conway PH, Cnaan A, Zaoutis T, Henry BV, Grundmeier RW, Keren R. Recurrent urinary tract infections in children: risk factors and association with prophylactic antimicrobials. JAMA. 2007 Jul 11;298(2):179-86.

From Paper to Electronic Health Record: Seven Years in Five Minutes (Not Currently Available)