About

Danielle Cullen, MD, MPH, MSHP, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Emergency Medicine) at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her clinical expertise is in Pediatric Emergency Medicine, and her research focuses on community-clinical partnerships to address food insecurity, social care integration, social determinants of health, and implementation science. She is the founder and director of the Complete Eats Program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and serves as a research faculty and principal instructor at PolicyLab. Cullen also holds roles as associate director of implementation science at Clinical Futures, director of health services research in the Division of Emergency Medicine, and senior fellow at the Penn Implementation Science Center (PISCE). She is involved in education as the director of the Implementation Science Certificate Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Family medicine
• Psychology
• Environmental health
• Nursing

Selected publications

• Caregiver Perceptions of Social Need Documentation

  JAMA Network Open · 2026-03-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This qualitative study uses a large free-text dataset to describe reasons for comfort and discomfort with documentation of health-related social needs in the electronic health record among caregivers of pediatric patients.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Comparing Patient-Centered Approaches to Social Care in the Emergency Department: A Mixed-Method Randomized Controlled Trial

  Annals of Emergency Medicine · 2026-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Effect of Price on Women, Infants, and Children-Eligible Caregiver Participation in a Produce Program: A Randomized Trial

  Academic Pediatrics · 2025-07-15

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• More than Meeting the Mandate: Leveraging Implementation Mapping to Support Meaningful Implementation of EPA-based CBME in Pediatric Training

  Academic Pediatrics · 2025-11-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Evaluation of a notes-based rapid qualitative analysis method to facilitate implementation

  Implementation Science Communications · 2025-03-03 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  BACKGROUND: Qualitative methodologies offer a nuanced approach to understanding stakeholder perspectives, preferences, and context in implementation research. However, traditional qualitative data analysis can be time consuming and create barriers to responsive implementation of interventions. Rapid qualitative methods that yield timely, actionable results have emerged to expedite the evidence-to-practice gap, but often require all analysts to have implementation science expertise and resources for interview transcription. This study describes a novel rapid qualitative method to identify participant-driven social care recommendations in real time. METHODS: Caregivers of pediatric patients were enrolled onsite at two primary care clinics and one emergency department affiliated with a large urban pediatric healthcare system. A semi-structured interview guide was developed using the Health Equity Implementation Framework and Integrated Behavioral Model in partnership with multidisciplinary implementation stakeholders. Telephone interviews explored 60 caregivers' experiences with and perceptions of receiving social resources from healthcare. For traditional analysis, NVivo12 was used to code the first 10 verbatim transcripts to generate themes in an integrated inductive/deductive approach. In the rapid approach, a summary notes template designed to capture implementation-related data was completed immediately following the same 10 interviews. A secondary analyst used the templates to create participant-level summaries and identify implementation-related themes. Themes found in each method were quantified and mapped onto each other using an analytic matrix to compare the number and consistency of themes. RESULTS: Themes generated in both methods mapped consistently onto each other; 92.8% of themes found in traditional analysis were accounted for within our rapid method. The quantity of themes was similar between the two methods: the traditional approach generated 69 themes and 22 subthemes, while our rapid approach generated 72 themes and 21 subthemes. CONCLUSIONS: Our interview notes-based rapid qualitative method was successful in producing themes consistent with the traditional approach in both content and quantity. This approach is also pragmatic, as it does not require analysts to have deep implementation science expertise and saves transcription costs. By balancing rigor with time to actionable results, this rapid method provides a tool for implementation researchers to generate qualitative findings on an accelerated timeline to inform policy and practice. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: This study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, #NCT05251311, https://www. CLINICALTRIALS: gov/study/NCT05251311 , on September 30, 2021.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Co-Designing a Justice-Oriented Assessment System in a Pediatric Residency Program: Report from the Designing for Equity in Medical Education Project

  Perspectives on Medical Education · 2025-04-07 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Background and Need for Innovation: There is a large body of evidence that assessment systems in medical education are inequitable for many groups of learners. A common approach to improve equity has been the use of organizational strategies, where training program leaders work to develop and implement improvements in existing assessment systems from their perspective to improve equity. However, emerging assessment approaches, such as justice-oriented assessment, argue that assessment systems must be made more equitable by critique and re-building through co-design with learners, assessors, and other key users. Little is known about how to apply these methods to workplace-based assessment in medical education. Goal of Innovation: To fill the knowledge gap about how to co-design a more equitable, justice-oriented, workplace-based assessment system in pediatric post-graduate medical education. Steps taken for Development and Implementation of innovation: Using the Design Justice framework, the authors completed 4 of the 5 phases of Design Thinking to co-design with learners and other users a workplace-based assessment system in their institution's pediatric residency program. Evaluation of Innovation: To understand whether and how Design Justice principles were present and operationalized in the process of co-designing the assessment system, the authors evaluated the design activities in each phase of the Design Thinking process, the outputs of the design process, and the experiences of participating users. Critical Reflection: Evidence of Design Justice principles included participants' feelings of being heard, affirmed, and empowered, as well as the design teams' iterative, critical reflection on making the project accessible, accountable, sustainable, and collaborative. This project offers a practical example of co-designing a justice-oriented assessment system, the process and principles of which can inform the efforts of advancing equity in assessment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Competitors Unite: A Cross-Health System Collaboration to Address Community Food Insecurity

  Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved · 2025-11-01

  articleSenior author

  Collaborative Opportunities to Advance Community Health (COACH) is a cross-health system partnership organized to collectively meet federal Community Health Needs Assessment implementation planning requirements while addressing community food insecurity. Partners developed a food insecurity screening and resource referral model, screening 7,126 patients during an 18-month pilot period.

  PublisherDOI

• What Would Be Required of Structural Determinants of Health Screening and Follow-Up to Improve Children’s Health Equity?

  The AMA Journal of Ethic · 2025-09-01

  articleOpen access

  A growing body of evidence considers how addressing adverse structural drivers of health (aSDoH) can improve children's overall health, thereby reinforcing pediatricians' role in advancing health equity early in life.Yet the optimal strategy for aSDoH screening and intervention remains unclear.This article examines barriers to equitable aSDoH screening, referral, and intervention, questioning the necessity of screening tool validation when the primary goal is to connect families with necessary resources.It also explores caregiver engagement, key considerations behind documentation of results, and the need for multilingual screening. Screening ToolsStructural drivers of health (SDoH)-previously referred to as social determinants of health-are defined as community-level factors that influence health.Numerous pediatric screening tools help clinicians identify and assess adverse SDoH (aSDoH) in a wide range of domains. 1,2Most hospitals adapt existing screening tools but some develop their own, which introduces screening variability across health care settings.This variability is a barrier to children's health equity and to aSDoH research, and it complicates data collection, resource allocation decisions, and intervention targeting. 3tably, while many pediatric aSDoH screening tools are relevant to their target populations, most have not undergone psychometric testing. 1,4Currently, only 2 pediatric aSDoH screening tools have undergone such testing: Well Childcare Visit, Evaluation, Community Resources, Advocacy, Referral, Education (WE CARE) and the Safe Environment for Every Kid Parent Screening Questionnaire (SEEK-PSQ), each of which was validated in outpatient settings. 1While these screening tools demonstrate reliability and validity, their implementation and effectiveness remain mixed, particularly in driving interventions that lead to improved health outcomes.Additionally, since SEEK and WE CARE have primarily been used in the outpatient and primary care settings, their validity and applicability in inpatient settings remain uncertain.While pediatric aSDoH screening in the inpatient setting may resemble that of the outpatient setting, important nuances specific to the inpatient population may be overlooked.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Factor Analysis to Streamline Social Screening for the Emergency Department

  Academic Emergency Medicine · 2025-11-06

  articleOpen access

  INTRODUCTION: Emergency departments (EDs) are increasingly required to screen for social risk and social need, but existing tools are long, hindering their utility in clinical settings, and resulting in incomplete surveys. However, strategies for streamlining screening tools remain unclear. This work aimed to guide future development of an ED-based screener by using a health system's ten-item social risk/social need questionnaire to (1) compare differences in patient populations by questionnaire completeness, (2) observe patterns of responses (e.g., what questions cover the same constructs and can potentially be eliminated), and (3) test for variation in social risk/social need measurement by age. METHODS: This cross-sectional study evaluated patients who responded to at least one question in the social risk/social need questionnaire in our regional health system from February 2019 to March 2023. Descriptive analyses examined patients stratified by questionnaire completeness: lower response (< 60%) versus higher response (≥ 60%). Within the higher response group, factor analysis extracted social risk/social need constructs and the strength of the association between each questionnaire item and its corresponding social risk/social need construct. RESULTS: Among 330,109 individuals, 248,808 (75%) completed the survey. In the lower response group (28,985; 9%), more patients were caregivers of children ≤ 4 years (18,231; 63%) and had commercial insurance (21,009; 72%) compared to the higher response group (23,873; 8% and 149,814; 50%, respectively). Factor analysis revealed a three-factor structure of the social risk/social need framework which we labeled: core resources, housing, and ability to work. From the magnitude of factor loadings, the items with the strongest indication of social risk/social need were paying for utilities, upcoming housing instability, and unemployment. CONCLUSION: In this health system, incomplete social risk/social need questionnaires are common. To improve response rates, the social risk/social need framework elucidated by our factor analysis will guide the development of a consolidated questionnaire for the EDs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measured Twice: Time for the Expansion of Social Care Interventions and Patient-Centered Outcomes

  Annals of Emergency Medicine · 2024-01-03 · 4 citations

  editorial1st author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joel A. Fein

  University of Pennsylvania

  16 shared

• Ashlee Murray

  8 shared

• Katie E. McPeak

  University of Pennsylvania

  8 shared

• Megan M. Attridge

  Lurie Children's Hospital

  6 shared

• Rachel Brown

  University of Otago

  5 shared

• Georgia Reilly

  Community Initiatives

  5 shared

• Zoe Bouchelle

  Denver Health Medical Center

  4 shared

• Leslie Castelo‐Soccio

  National Institutes of Health

  4 shared