The Evanston, Ill.-based NorthShore University HealthSystem and precision medicine company Color have completed what officials call the largest U.S. genomics program to date.
A year ago, NorthShore and Color announced their partnership to integrate clinical genomics into routine primary care. The program, DNA-10K, has met its goals of enrolling 10,000 participants and providing patients with actionable clinical genomic results, including risks for cancer, heart disease and how genes affect responses to medication.
This partnership incorporates clinical genomic results into patients' electronic medical records (EMRs), where real-time alerts allow providers to leverage genomic insights at the frontlines of care for long-term actionability and enhanced decision making by physicians and providers at NorthShore, officials noted.
As John Mark Revis, M.D., a primary care physician at NorthShore University HealthSystem, told Healthcare Innovation in a story in late 2018, one of the key elements involved in the advanced primary care program is screening out, via the 30-question questionnaire, patients who should be further tested, based on current national guidelines. “The questions are looking for specifically actionable family history items that, following national guidelines, would trigger additional genetic testing,” he said.
Indeed, DNA-10K's potential to improve patient care proved critical for NorthShore physicians, according to health system leaders, who note that 116, or 99 percent, of eligible physicians ordered the test for their patients. In an internal survey of physicians who ordered the test for their patients, more than half said DNA-10K has already provided a direct clinical benefit to patients, and 81 percent said it would in the future.
"We've built a model of advanced primary care that is transforming the delivery of healthcare," J.P. Gallagher, president and CEO of NorthShore, said in a prepared statement. "We've seen firsthand that genetic information is a foundational part of healthcare for all patients. Clinically relevant findings provide lifesaving information that physicians can immediately use to diagnose, treat and even avoid diseases."
What’s more, thanks to the power of NorthShore’s pharmacogenomics program, if the patient has a specific genetic tendency to respond to one medication over another, when the clinician puts the prescription in the EMR, the system triggers an alert, reminding the physician which medicines the patient may best respond to, based on his or her genetic information.
Beyond clinical genomic testing, DNA-10K provided key resources that helped NorthShore scale genomics efficiently to over 10,000 patients. And, Color's genetic counseling infrastructure helped patients and NorthShore physicians interpret results and map patients' healthcare plans for the future, officials noted. Of the patients who took advantage of genetic counseling, 99 percent were able to within 48 hours of requesting an appointment compared to the industry standard of 4 to 6 weeks.
Officials said that the partnership will now expand in 2020 to 30 additional clinics within the NorthShore system and its newest partner, Swedish Hospital, while integrating more sophisticated information into clinical care including predictive polygenic risk scores for type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease.
