Wednesday, February 24, 2016

EPIC Integrates Genelex's Pharmacogenomics Decision Support System into Electronic Health Records

On Feb 23rd, Pharmagenomics (PGx) testing company Genelex announced enhanced connection with  Epic, the most widely used electronic health record (EHR) system in US. With this new connectivity, healthcare systems and providers using Epic EHRs will be able to use Genelex's YouScript Precision Prescribing software to better identify patients who are at greater risk of adverse drug events based on pharmacogenetic information. In a GenomeWebnews article, Genelex CEO Kristine Ashcraft said “It's an indicator of market adoption and market demand for pharmacogenetic information”.

Translating pharmacogenomics knowledge into clinical practice has not been an easy task. Barriers that prevent the widespread use of PGx diagnostics include the lack of incentives for health care systems to conduct tests as well as lack of clear clinical guidelines for translating genetic variations into actionable recommendations. Additionally, computational tools for clinical decision support (CDS) will need to be developed and integrated in the EHR to prompt and guide clinicians on how to use genetic information when prescribing drugs. CPIC was formed in 2009 as a collaborative project between PharmGKB and the Pharmacogenomics ResearchNetwork to address some of the challenges in clinical implementation. Its goal was to create guidelines to aid clinicians on how genetic test results should be translated into specific prescribing actions. CPIC guidelines are simultaneously published and maintained on PharmGKB website, in both plain text as well as computable form for easy integration into clinical decision support tools. Many of the CPIC guidelines have been endorsed by professional societies such as The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). CPIC have also established informatics subgroup to support the adoption of the CPIC guidelines by developing tools to combine clinical information from the EHR with the information from the CPIC guidelines and use them for clinical decision support. Preemptive pharmacogenomic testing programs using EHRs and decision support tools have been deployed at several academic medical centers, eg. St. JudeVanderbilt University and University of Florida.

Read the GenomeWeb article:
Read the press release from Genelex:
More information about CPIC and CPIC informatics working group:
https://cpicpgx.org/informatics/

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