February 2026

NEUROSCIENCES

ALLAN WU, MD: REDEFINING STANDARDS IN PARKINSON’S CARE AND CLINICAL INFORMATICS

From pioneering EHR advances to preparing clinicians for an AI-driven future, Allan D. Wu, MD, a movement disorders specialist and clinical informaticist, is helping define the next era of excellence in Parkinson’s disease care.

An Engineer’s Approach to Neurology
Dr. Wu’s journey into movement disorders began with his engineering background and research in eye movement control, focusing on how the brain orchestrates complex movement. This curiosity guided him through neurology training, a neuromuscular fellowship and finally a movement disorders fellowship at University of Southern California, where he combined clinical work with physical therapists for research in biokinesiology and the control of movement.

For over 15 years at University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Wu integrated movement disorders care, biomedical engineering and clinical informatics. His expertise then led him to Northwestern Medicine and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where he focuses on movement disorders and clinical informatics education for physicians.

Clinical Care Grounded in Precision and Collaboration
Dr. Wu emphasizes that movement disorders continues to be one of the neurological specialties where the bedside exam, not ancillary testing, drives clinical diagnosis. That makes clinical observation, communication and pattern recognition essential.

He champions a whole-patient approach, acknowledging diagnostic uncertainty, addressing multimorbidity and empowering patients as active participants in their care. Dr. Wu promotes clinical transparency, encouraging patients to read and understand their clinical notes, a practice he promoted long before open-note policies became required.

Building National Infrastructure for Safer Parkinson’s Hospitalization
For the past decade, Dr. Wu has served as a peer-elected volunteer on the Epic Adult Neurology Specialty Steering Board, collaborating with the Parkinson’s Foundation and Epic Systems (a major electronic health record vendor) to embed Parkinson’s safety standards directly into the Epic Foundation System, the default configuration used by many major health systems. This work has produced significant, scalable improvements:
  • Prominent Parkinson’s indicators in the Epic clinician storyboard linked to Parkinson’s Foundation guidance
  • Automatic neurologist notifications when patients with Parkinson’s are hospitalized
  • Out-of-the-box safety and planning reports, including identification of currently admitted or upcoming admissions for patients with Parkinson’s disease.
  • Drug-drug interaction logic tailored to medications contraindicated for people with Parkinson’s disease
  • A change that enables exact dose and timed prescriptions for critical Parkinson’s medications to carry that information seamlessly from outpatient care to inpatient orders and back again, helping reduce risk of in-hospital medication errors

These enhancements give every Epic-using organization an infrastructure to improve inpatient Parkinson’s care.

Collaborative Leadership Driving National Standards
Northwestern Medicine was selected to join the Parkinson’s Foundation Hospital Care Learning Collaborative, led locally by Danielle N. Larson, MD, in collaboration with Linda Egan and with Dr. Wu providing strategic informatics expertise. This collaborative brings together health systems from around the country that collectively engage in quality improvement projects targeting hospital safety for people with Parkinson’s disease. The collaborative provides a forum by which strategies for improving care are shared amongst each other and by which the vendor-level (Epic) changes.
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In addition, Dr. Wu leads a pilot project along with Natalia Chunga, MD, at Louisiana State University, Shreveport, and Benjamin George, MD, at University of Rochester, in collaboration with Parkinson’s Foundation and Epic, to develop a standardized toolkit for healthcare organizations to benchmark Parkinson’s Hospital Safety including tools to track and compare medication timeliness, contraindicated prescriptions and potential complications or delays in hospital admissions for People with Parkinson’s.  
 
Their long-term goal is to establish a national baseline for safe Parkinson’s hospital care and equip every health system to exceed it.

Preparing Neurologists for the AI Era
As director of Northwestern Medicine’s Clinical Informatics Fellowship, Dr. Wu is training physicians to lead in a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. AI tools have the potential to benefit the healthcare journey in areas including:
  • Visit preparation and triage support
  • Automated clinical documentation
  • High-volume chart review and research data extraction from clinical notes
  • Improved communication pathways for patients and care teams

He emphasizes deliberate, ethical, responsible adoption that prioritizes privacy, transparency and clinical judgment.

Building a National ‘Parkinson’s Passport’ for Seamless Care
Looking ahead, Dr. Wu envisions a future where essential Parkinson’s information seamlessly follows patients across healthcare settings. He advocates for a standardized “Parkinson’s passport,” a concise set of essential and up-to-date clinical information that follows the patient across all healthcare settings and is aligned with the rapidly evolving national healthcare interoperability systems that will support better patient care across the healthcare journey while providing core data that can drive innovation for research and quality measurement, and elevate clinical practice nationwide.
Allan D. Wu, MD, Professor of Movement Disorders and Hospital Neurology at Northwestern Medicine

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