Products and Services: Genomic-enabled EHR
It is already well known that cancer is a genetic disease, and therefore genomic information should be required to diagnose, stratify and treat cancer. The main current domains and applications of genomic data in research and clinical practice can be divided in the following categories:
- Gene expression profiling
- Measure genetic variation (SNPs)
- Identification of predisposition risk factors
- Pharmacogenetics
An important observation is that current EMR and EHR solutions do not support clinical research requirements, despite the fact that the data in clinical practice is regarded as a valuable source of information for new research and for validation of results in many important cancer centers. Not being able to properly query their clinical practice data deprives the healthcare organizations of a valuable resource that could be used for improving the treatment of cancer patients. As more and more data of various types (clinical, genomic, imaging, pathology, etc.) is being collected for current clinical practice, it becomes increasingly important to preserve that data and to use it for research but also for the future benefit of the patient, in the light of new discoveries. Preserving the data is especially meaningful when storing and maintaining it is significantly cheaper than acquiring and analyzing it, and when new insight can be obtained based on old data, as it is the case with genomic information. In this context, we also focus on identifying the relevant pieces of information and proposing a data model for genomic data to become part of a future, genomic-enabled EHR.
Auca Bucur, Erwin Bonsma