The Mount Sinai Medical Center, the New York City-based 1,171 bed tertiary- and quaternary-care teaching facility, has announced it's creating a new data management and analysis platform that will be able to communicate with the organization’s electronic health record. The platform, Mount Sinai says, will be able to give doctors real-time therapeutic and diagnostic guidance based on the patient’s genetic profile.
Mount Sinai says it will pilot-test the platform through a research program called CLIPMERGE, which stands for CLinical Implementation of Personalized Medicine through Electronic health Records and Genomics. It will invite 1,500 Mount Sinai patients to participate in this program. Once they agree to take part, their DNA, derived from saliva, will be analyzed for genetic variations that may affect how a drug works in that individual.
The data will be stored on the platform until they have been prescribed a medication by their physician for whom CLIPMERGE has genomically-relevant information. An example of this information would be side-effects based on genetic variation. If this is the case, Mount Sinai says CLIPMERGE will be able to send a message, in real time, to the physician to let them know. The clinical decision support tool, Mount Sinai says, will include a text alert on the EHR, which will explain why they’re being alerted, some alternative medications, and a link to reference material.
"Our knowledge of pharmacogenomics, or genome-drug interactions, and how genetics can influence why some patients react better to some drugs than others, is growing rapidly and will likely transform how drugs are prescribed in the future," stated lead author and the principal investigator of CLIPMERGE Omri Gottesman, M.D., a physician- scientist at The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "What has been lacking to date is technology that can enable us to effectively implement pharmacogenomic information at the point of care and sufficient knowledge about how this information should be communicated to doctors.”
