Whether you call it precision medicine, personalized medicine or simply genomics, it’s a hot topic these days.
In his annual State of the Union address in January, President Obama announced his Precision Medicine Initiative, though he offered few details. Two months later, he named the team that would shape the direction of this program.
Meantime, several healthcare delivery systems have accelerated their push into the field of genomics. NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Ill., launched an online genomic medicine decision support application in May 2014, for example. This week saw two new developments on this front.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
On Monday, Geisinger Health System, based in Danville, Pa., opened the doors of its Geisinger Precision Health Center, a 14,000-square-foot building in Forty Fort, Pa., that includes what the organization calls a “first-of-its-kind” telemedicine genomics program.
Thursday, Swedish Cancer Institute, part of Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center, announced that it would install the Syapse Precision Medicine Platform, a software package that will mine the institute’s Epic Systems EHR and genomic records to match patients’ genetic mutations to treatments most appropriate to their tumors. Swedish introduced its personalized medicine program a year ago.
The Geisinger Precision Health Center, six miles from Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and about an hour from Danville headquarters, houses the organization’s clinical genomics department, a second branch of the Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute and the new telemedicine genomics operations.
“The basic approach to clinical research in the Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute is also a genomics and precision medicine approach,” explained David Ledbetter, Geisinger’s executive vice president and chief scientific officer. He said that the institute is actively recruiting autistic children and their families to conduct genetic testing.
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A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Geisinger decided to launch the telemedicine genomics program because it covers such a large geographic area, pretty much the eastern two-thirds of Pennsylvania, other than metropolitan Philadelphia. “We will be offering patients the option of coming in” or having remote consultations at other Geisinger clinics, Ledbetter said.
Geisinger has had a form of what is now called precision medicine since it started the MyCode Community Health Initiative, a biobank for clinical research, in 2007. “The biobank was successful but rather small,” said Ledbetter, who joined in 2010.
In the last five years, the organization has assembled a team of physician geneticists and genetic counselors, who meet with patients at high risk for certain diseases to gather personal and family medical histories. “When genetic testing is done, it’s often the genetic counselor who’s involved in explaining the results,” Ledbetter said.
Geisinger signed a contract with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in January 2014 to conduct DNA sequencing for at least 100,000 patients over a five-year period. Ledbetter said this week that the health system now wants to have 250,000 participants in precision medicine between now and the end of the decade. “That goal makes it one of the largest [genomics programs] in the world,” Ledbetter said, “and the others are whole countries.”
