The Department of Health and Human Services is launching an effort to integrate genomics into clinical information systems so that a patient’s genetic makeup can be considered in preventing, diagnosing and treating disease.
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said he has “put together a team that is working together across HHS,” with representatives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other health agencies.
In the future, increased understanding of genetics will allow doctors to treat patients more as unique individuals rather than members of a group of adults, Leavitt said. He calls the initiative personalized health care.
When Leavitt announced the initiative Sept. 12 at the American Health Information Community (AHIC) meeting, William Winkenwerder, assistant Defense secretary, asked that the Department of Defense be included, and Leavitt readily assented.
Leavitt said genomics will play an increasingly larger role in medicine, and now is the time to figure out how best to incorporate genetic information into e-health records, before multiple nonstandard approaches take hold. He predicted that within a decade, genomics will transform the way medicine is practiced.
Among the uses of genomics in medicine, some people are being tested to identify their risk for diseases such as breast cancer, age-related sight loss and inherited ailments such as Tay-Sachs disease.
Once a person has a disease, genetic testing sometimes can help determine the best course of treatment. And diseases caused by genetic abnormalities can sometimes be reversed with gene therapy.
In a brief presentation to AHIC, the high-level advisory panel Leavitt leads, Gregory Downing, director of the Office of Technology and Industrial Relations at the National Cancer Institute at NIH, said a framework is needed for interfaces between genomic information and health information technology. Standard ways of storing and using genomics are emerging, but they need harmonization with emerging EHR standards, he said.
Leavitt said he was unsure whether AHIC would be asked to address the genomics question because it is already working on other health IT-related issues.
“We maintain a very large DNA repository,” Winkenwerder said. His department could use some help in working with the genetic information and could contribute some know-how to the HHS effort, he said.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
