What’s Required for an Enterprise Vision for Precision Medicine?

At the recent HIMSS 2021 conference in Las Vegas, I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Joel Diamond, Chief Medical Officer at 2bPrecise and Dr. Maulik Purohit, Chief Innovation Lead and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at UH Cleveland.  In the discussion Dr. Diamond complimented Dr. Purohit and his team for having one of the most comprehensive and true Enterprise level visions for precision medicine at their healthcare organization.

After hearing such a compliment, I had to explore what a true Enterprise vision for precision medicine included.  Dr. Purohit then rolled off the entire spectrum of efforts to be able to do precision medicine effectively at a healthcare organization.  Here’s my cliff notes version of what he described along with a few of my own experiences:

DNA Tests – Precision medicine starts with patients having access to the DNA tests.  Obviously, if the tests aren’t happening, you can’t do the rest of the process.  The costs of tests are coming down where these tests are going to become more and more common and may eventually be part of every patient’s care.

Results Stored in the EHR – It’s great to do the DNA tests for precision medicine, but if the results don’t make their way back to the EHR, then it’s going to be much harder for them to be made actionable.  A separate repository is great for research, but you have to bridge to the point of care if you want to make those DNA tests actionable.  Needless to say, EHR vendors still have a fair bit of work to do in this regard.  We previously featured MEDITECH’s genomics integrations, but we hear that many of the other EHRs are storing it in existing fields rather than building out a full area for genomic data.  Not hard to imagine how this will eventually catch up to them and render the genomic data less than useful.