Dr. Karl Kochendorfer is a practicing family physician and Professor of Clinical Family and Community Medicine. He is Board certified in Clinical Informatics and Family Medicine and has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He has founded or led many enterprise initiatives, including Meaningful Use (MU), Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI), Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Clinical Guideline and Protocol Oversight, Patient Portal and Data Governance Committees. He holds several informatics related patents, serves on the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) Executive Committee, and leads the CREATE WISDOM Science team utilizing AI to address wicked problems in healthcare for vulnerable populations.

With his background in both medicine and informatics, Dr. Kochendorfer develops, deploys and evaluates leading-edge health IT solutions, so that clinicians can better care for their patients by adhering to the quadruple aim of higher quality, lower cost and improved patient and provider experience.

Clinic Location: Family Medicine Center at University Village

Clinical Interests: Dr. Karl M. Kochendorfer is a dedicated practitioner in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at UI Health's University Village Family Medical Center. With a keen interest in leveraging technology to enhance patient care, he seamlessly combines his clinical expertise with innovative technical solutions. Dr. Kochendorfer provides comprehensive care, addressing urgent, chronic, and preventive needs for patients across all age groups.

Research Interests:

Dr. Karl Kochendorfer is deeply committed to the development of equitable, trustworthy, and ethically sourced patient datasets for use in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML). With a rich background in IT and as the founder of a digital health technology company, he has patented innovations in clinical decision support and information retrieval technology.

Over his three-decade career, Dr. Kochendorfer has consistently merged computer science with medicine, emphasizing support for underrepresented communities and advancing the field of informatics. This commitment is reflected in his leadership roles in major technology initiatives and his mentorship, particularly for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds.

He has been an integral part of significant informatics-related federal grants and awards, amassing more than $50M in funding from agencies like NIH, CTSA, CMS, AHRQ, and collaborations with private corporations. His collaborative work with engineering teams across UIC and UIUC has pioneered new predictive models for COVID.

Currently serving as CHIO, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, and Associate CMO at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System (UI Health), Dr. Kochendorfer is at the nexus of a plethora of research endeavors. His core strength lies in forming interdisciplinary teams in informatics, data science, and operations that utilize EHR data. These teams create synergies between clinicians, data scientists, and engineers, addressing the quadruple aim: improved health outcomes, reduced costs, and enhanced patient and clinician experiences.

Among his most recent initiatives are the internally funded AIM-COVID project, focusing on COVID prediction models, and the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) sponsored CREATE WISDOM initiative, aimed at establishing an AI Center in Medicine dedicated to vulnerable populations.

Selected Grants:

Principal Investigator, CREATE WISDOM: Clinical Research, Engineering and AI Teams to Address Wicked Problems in Healthcare through Informatics, Engineering, Data Science and Medicine. Karl Kochendorfer, MD (PI), Ravishankar Iyer, PhD (Co-PI). Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) Research and Development Cluster Seed Grant Program, 9/1/2020 – ongoing. $124,882 total costs, 1% effort.

Co-Investigator, I-BRAIN - A Big Data of the Human Brain Analytics Platform and Scientific Cluster. Jeffrey Loeb, MD, PhD (PI). Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) Research and Development Cluster Seed Grant Program, 9/1/2020 – ongoing. $125,000 total costs. 0%.

Co-Investigator, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Cardio-Oncology. Jacob Krive, PhD (Co-PI); Chetan Bhardwaj, MD (Co-PI). OSF-UIC Community Health Advocacy (CHA) innovation seed grant. 6/1/2022 – 5/31/2023. $75,000 total costs. 0%.

Co-Principal Investigator, Social Determinants of Healthcare Utilization: A Big Data Predictive Modeling Approach. Dr. Sarah Stewart de Ramirez, MD, OSF Healthcare; Dr. Sage Kim, PhD, UIC SPH (Co-PI); Dr. Karl Kochendorfer, MD, UI Health (Co-PI); Arash Jalali, MPH, MSHI, Karl Kochendorfer, MD, FAAFP, FAMIA – 2023 11 UIC SPH, UI Health (Co-PI). Community Health Advocacy (CHA) program through the UIC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Innovation grant. 1/1/2022 – 1/1/2023. $75,000 total costs. 0%.

Principal Investigator, Mining Patient Cluster Patterns from Electronic Health Records. Karl Kochendorfer, MD (PI). Alike Health Sponsored Research. 10/16/2020 – 10/15/2021. $55,415 total costs, 1% effort.

Co-Principal Investigator, Artificial Intelligence Modeling for COVID-19 Disease (AIM-COVID) to define COVID-19 clinical disease severity stages, improve clinical management decisions and develop a clinical outcome prediction model. UL1TR002003. Andrew Trotter, MD, MPH (PI). National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences Pilot Grant Award, 6/1/2020 – 5/31/2021. $29,991 total costs. 0%.

Co-Investigator, University of Illinois at Chicago GWEP COVID19 Engage IL: Optimizing care of vulnerable older patients via telehealth during COVID19. T1MHP39059. Valerie Gruss, PhD, APN, CNP-BC (PI). US Department of Health and Human Services: HRSA. 05/01/2020 – 04/30/2021. $90,625 total costs. 0%.

Site-Principal Investigator, Improving Patient Reported Outcome Data for Research through Seamless Integration of the PROMIS Toolkit into EHR Workflows. 1U01TR001806-01. Justin Starren, MD (PI). National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, 7/1/2016 – 6/30/2021. $6,300,000 total costs, 5% effort.

Co-Investigator, Integrating Contextual Factors into Clinical Decision Support. 1R01HS025374-01. Saul Weiner, MD (PI). Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). 7/1/2017 – 6/30/2021. $1,500,000 total costs, up to 9% effort.

Co-Investigator, A Search Engine for Heterogeneous Information Needs in the Clinical Workflow. 2R44 LM011590-02. Jayne Williams, MLS (PI). National Institutes of Health  (NIH) National Library of Medicine (NLM) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Award, 9/1/2016 – 5/31/2019. $950,000 direct and indirect costs, 5% effort.

Notable Honors:

National

Synthetic Health Data Generation for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Finalist 2021 Patients’ Choice Award (rated by patients and given to less than 5% of physicians) 2008, ‘09, ‘12

College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Collaboration of the Year Award for the University of Missouri-Cerner Corporation Medical Home Project 2008

AAFP Tomorrow’s Resident Leader Award and Scholarship Recipient 2005

HIMSS Nicholas E. Davies Award of EHR Excellence for UIC Medical Center 2001

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Graduate Student (Wael Mobeirek) Leadership Award 2022

University of Illinois Chicago

Blue-Cross Blue-Shield Health Equity Pilot Project Shark Tank of Quality Award 2022

George H. Miller Memorial Fund Health Science Student (Jaros) Research (HSSR) Award 2016

Society of Teachers in Family Medicine (STFM) Resident Teacher of the Year Award 2006

Family Medicine Residency Certificate of Appreciation for Vision 2006

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

Cao Y, Cao P, Chen H, Kochendorfer KM, Trotter AB, Galanter WL, Arnold P, Iyer RK.  (2023). Predicting ICU Admissions for Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients with a Factor Graph-based Model. In: Shaban-Nejad, A., Michalowski, M., Bianco, S. (eds) Multimodal AI in Healthcare. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1060. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14771-5_17

Dissanayake P, Kochendorfer KM. (2019) Clinical Decision Support Systems in Medicine. Gordon D. Brown, Kalyan S. Pasupathy, Timothy B. Patrick (ed.), Health Informatics: A Systems Perspective (pp. 121-146). Chicago, IL. Health Administration Press.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Conference Proceedings

Jalali A, Huang SS, Kochendorfer KM. Cloud Computing Synthetic Syndromic Surveillance Systems: Opioid Epidemic in Illinois. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2023 Apr 29;2022:580-586. PMID: 37128419; PMCID: PMC10148304.

Al-Droubi, SS, Jahangir, E, Kochendorfer, KM, Krive, M, Laufer-Perl, M, Gilon, D, . . . Krive, J. Artificial intelligence modelling to assess the risk of cardiovascular disease in oncology patients. European Heart Journal – Digital Health. doi:10.1093/ehjdh/ztad031

Huang SS, Chaisson LH, Galanter W, Jalali A, Menchaca M, Parde N, Rodríguez-Fernández JM, Trotter A, Kochendorfer KM. Lessons learned: Development of COVID-19 clinical staging models at a large urban research institution. J Clin Transl Sci. 2023 Mar 27;7(1): e113. doi:10.1017/cts.2023.26. PMID: 37250997; PMCID: PMC10225257.

Weiner, S. J., Schwartz, A., Weaver, F., Galanter, W., Olender, S., Kochendorfer, K., . . . Varkey, A. Effect of Electronic Health Record Clinical Decision Support on Contextualization of Care: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Netw Open. 2022 Oct 3;5(10):e2238231. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.38231. PMID: 36279133; PMCID: PMC9593230.

Pishgar M, Harford S, Theis J, Galanter W, Rodríguez-Fernández JM, Chaisson L, Zhang, Y, Trotter A, Kochendorfer KM, Boppana A, Darabi H. A Process Mining- Deep Learning Approach to Predict Survival in a Cohort of Hospitalized COVID‐19 Patients. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2022 Jul 25;22(1):194. PMID: 35879715.

Burton S, Valenta AL, Starren J, Abraham J, Nelson T, Kochendorfer K, Hughes A, Harris B, Boyd A. Examining Clinicians’ Perspectives on the Adoption and Use of Computer-Based Patient-Reported Outcomes: A Q Methodology Study”. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2022 Jan 29;29(3):443-452. PMID: 34871423.

Galanter W, Rodríguez-Fernández JM, Chow K, Harford S, Kochendorfer KM, Pishgar M, Theis J, Zulueta J, Darabi H. Predicting clinical outcomes among hospitalized COVID-19 patients using both local and published models. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2021 Jul 24;21(1):224. PMID: 8302976.

Vatani, H, Sharma, H, Azhar, K, Kochendorfer, KM, Valenta, AL, Lopez, KD. Required Data Elements for Interprofessional Rounds Through the Lens of Multiple Professions. Journal of Interprofessional Care. 2020 Nov 15:1-7. PMID: 33190565

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) - 1990-1994
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Medical School - 1996-2000
University of Illinois at Chicago Family Medicine Residency - 2000-2006
American Academy of Family Physicians – 8/1/09
American medical Informatics Association - 11/1/19

• Physician and Surgeon Permanent License, State of Illinois (8/2005 - present)
• Board Certified in Family Medicine (7/2006 – 12/2026)
• Board Certified in Clinical Informatics (1/2014 – 1/2024)
• Basic Life Support (BLS) through 12/2025
• Epic Physician Power User (9/2021)
• Epic for the Clinical Informaticist (2/2019)
• Epic NoteCraft for Physician Builders (8/2021)
• Epic Physician Builder (8/2021)

• AMIA – American Medical Informatics Association
• HIMSS – Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society
• AMDIS – Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems
• CHIME – College of Healthcare Information Management Executives
• AAFP – American Academy of Family Physicians
• IAFP – Illinois Academy of Family Physicians
• STFM – Society of Teachers in Family Medicine
• IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• AMA – American Medical Association

Peer-Reviewed Poster Sessions

Yasin H, Al-Droubi S, Kochendorfer KM, Krive M, Laufer-Perl M, Gilon D, Moslehi J, Gans C, Arnold J, Okwuosa T, Jahangir E, Rini B, Krive J. Artificial intelligence modeling to predict the risk of cardiotoxicity among renal cell carcinoma patients treated with vascular endothelial growth factor receptors tyrosine kinase inhibitors (VEGFRi). 2022 IKCS (International Kidney Cancer Symposium): North America. November 4-5, 2022.

Quinones J, Kochendorfer KM. Spirituality in Medicine: Meeting Patients’ Spiritual Needs and Providing More Holistic Care. 91st Annual Educational Conference by the Catholic Medical Association. Denver, CO. September 10, 2022.

Rodríguez-Fernández JM, Danies E, Patel KP, Boyd A, Pyrros A, Kochendorfer KM, Galanter W. The Impact of Comorbidities on telemedicine implementation during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Senior US Adults. AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference. Houston, TX. May 25, 2022.

Jalali, A, Huang, S, Kochendorfer, KM. Azure Modern Analytics Architecture for Synthetic Syndromic Surveillance. Center for Computational Biotechnology & Genomic Medicine AI in Healthcare Workshop. Urbana, IL. November 11, 2021.

Rodríguez, J.M., Danies E, Galanter W, Boyd A, Pyrros A, Kochendorfer KM. Chronic medical conditions effects on telemedicine implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic in senior US adults. AMIA 2021 Annual Symposium. San Diego, CA. November 1, 2021.

Azhar, K, Ching, W, Boppana, A, Boyd, AD, Kochendorfer, KM. The Impact of Order Set Implementation on Inappropriate Vaccination. UI Health Quality Fair. Chicago, IL. December, 2020.

Azhar, K, Ching, W, Boppana, A, Boyd, AD, Kochendorfer, KM. The Impact of Order Set Implementation on Inappropriate Vaccination. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Informatics Summit. Chicago, IL. November, 2020.

Nelson, T. A., Anderson, B., Bian, J., Boyd, A. D., Burton, S. V., Davis, K., Guo, Y., Harris, B. A., Hynes, K., Kochendorfer, K., Liebovitz, D., Martin, K., Moses, J., Soulakis, N., Weinbrenner, D., White, S., Rothrock, N.E., Valenta, A. L., & Starren, J. B. Development of a Clinic Implementation Roadmap for the Epic PROMIS App. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Informatics Summit. Chicago, IL. November, 2020.

Williams, J.A, Kruse, R.L, Alafaireet, P.E, Belden, J.L, Kochendorfer, K. Embedding a medical search engine within an electronic health record, in American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium 2014: Washington DC