Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is working to launch Epic’s new genomics module by summer 2021, which will make results available as structured data.
Many treatment centers post actionable test results into the EHR as PDF files, according to a story on the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center web site. “For the clinician who’s deciding what treatment to use in a given patient’s case, the PDF works fine,” explained Travis Osterman, D.O., M.S., assistant professor of biomedical informatics and medicine and director of cancer clinical informatics at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. “But what happens when a new targeted drug suddenly becomes available? When we have structured versions of all of these test data, we can sift through our entire patient population and contact oncologists about any specific patients of theirs who might stand to benefit.”
With Epic’s genomics module turned on, clinician orders will be transmitted electronically to outside laboratories that conduct these tests, and VUMC’s lab information system will be able to track fulfillment automatically instead of manually.
As new results are returned, alerts will pop up in the EHR message inboxes of clinicians, and, for the first time, they will be able to filter their patients’ records by genomic test results. Structured results for these molecular tests will also allow automatic alerts to fire whenever a result appears to match a patient for recruitment to a given clinical trial. The new genomics module will also integrate up to 10 years of backlogged structured data into the current EHR, providing a comprehensive basis for prospective automated clinical decision support around experimental treatments and newly approved drugs.
“We have new drug approvals in the oncology space that sometimes come out at an alarming rate,” Osterman said in the article, “and it’s hard for clinicians to keep up on that. The same thing is true of clinical trial openings.”
A year ago, Healthcare Innovation reported that Rush University Medical Center in Chicago was the first healthcare organization to launch Epic's module for genomic results. Rush said it would use the module as part of its Precision Oncology Center to integrate genomic sequencing data into oncologists' daily workflows. Integrating genomic data into the electronic health record provides clinicians with a single view of a patient's genomic and other clinical information. To really deliver on the promise of precision oncology, providers need to access, interpret and apply this genomic information where and when clinical decisions are made: the EHR,” said Mia Levy, M.D., Ph.D., the Sheba Foundation Director of the Rush University Cancer Center, in a statement. “This new technology makes point-of-care insights and interventions possible.”
Before coming to Rush in 2018, Levy helped build data-driven, clinical decision support functionality at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.
Levy noted that while the ability to detect and analyze changes to a person's genome has grown exponentially in the last several years, the ability to translate that information into specific and practical therapies was limited by the structural inability of EHRs make that data part of the clinical workflow.
