S. Andrew Spooner, MD, MS, FAAP

Biography

I practice as an attending physician on our Hospital Medicine service and serve as the Chief Medical Information Officer for Cincinnati Children’s. The medical informatics research areas I'm most interested in are medication-dosing decision support, problem-based reasoning, digital patient engagement and pediatric aspects of electronic health records.

I was led to these areas of interest through my longstanding interest in information technology. I completed a medical informatics fellowship in the early 1990s, which was many years before the advent of widespread electronic health records.

As health informatics continued to evolve, I saw the need to ensure that information systems meet pediatric healthcare services' unique needs. My work is focused on any area where the special needs of children’s health and information technology intersect.

My patient care specialty is hospital medicine. Working with children, I saw how parenting is the most important human occupation and that managing health is a big part of parenting. I was drawn to the pediatric field when I realized the need for parents to have a strong partnership with their child’s healthcare provider.

Digital technology is transforming children's healthcare services. In my roles as Chief Medical Information Officer and faculty member in the Division of Biomedical Informatics, I want to make digital tools successful for pediatric patients.

Additionally, I served as the chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Clinical Information Technology for multiple years and was recognized by that body for contributions to this discipline. I have contributed to textbook chapters and articles published in various journals, such as Applied Clinical Informatics, JAMA Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.