As part of the $5 billion in grants announced by President Obama, the Bethesda, Md.-based National Institutes of Health has granted Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, Calif.) more than $54 million over two years through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to conduct health research on a multitude of public and clinical health areas.
According to Kaiser, the bulk of this research will utilize and leverage Kaiser Permanente’s electronic health records, the world’s largest civilian electronic health record database.
The NIH has awarded 22 grants to Kaiser Permanente researchers in various regional centers, including a $25 million Grand Opportunities (GO) grant to conduct genotyping on 100,000 Kaiser Permanente members participating in the Research Program on Genes, Environment and Health, the largest population-based bio-bank in the United States. This genetic information will be linked to data on participants from RPGEH health surveys, disease registries and Kaiser Permanente’s EHR database.
A separate NIH GO grant of nearly $4 million was awarded to the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., to study personalized medicine and genomic tests for colon cancer.
Also awarded was a $7.2 million GO grant to develop a cardiovascular surveillance system for the Cardiovascular Research Network (a collaborative of 14 different health plans across the U.S. with approximately 11 million health maintenance organization members) and $3.3 million GO grant to create a National Research Database that will organize and leverage Kaiser Permanente’s electronic health records.
