The Vancouver Clinic in Washington has started integrating patients’ genetic information into their Epic EHRs, providing decision support, increasing personalized care/therapies, and better managing hereditary risks.
The genetic information is integrated directly into the clinic’s EHR and can be seen in the provider’s normal workflow.
The clinic partnered with ActX Genomic Decision Support, a genomics data vendor that provides patients with lab kits to send genetic information to care providers, to get the project started.
Now, whenever providers order medications for their patients, they can see real-time alerts for any adverse reactions or issues based on the patient’s genetics. This is very valuable, as about 87 percent of patients who submit genetic data to ActX have a least one medication-related alert.
“The ability to use a patient’s individual genomic information as we care for them, and to consider this as we make treatment decisions about the use of medication, will make a powerful difference in our ability to give people the very best care available. We are very excited to bring these cutting-edge tools to our patients,” said Marcia Sparling, medical director for operations and IT at The Vancouver Clinic. “This is an evolving area of medicine, and this tool will only become more powerful with time.”
“We are very excited to work with The Vancouver Clinic and Epic to bring genomic decision support to The Vancouver Clinic,” said Andrew Ury, CEO of ActX. “Integrating this information with the EHR is crucial for making genomics part of everyday medical care and helping to improve health care quality and outcomes.”
