UPMC Progresses in Clinical and Genomic Data Integration Initiative

For the first time, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) have integrated clinical and genomic information on cancer patients, the organization announced.

This technological advancement comes eight months after UPMC rolled out a five-year, $100 million enterprise healthcare analytics initiative to foster personalized medicine and other strategic healthcare IT goals. UPMC says the first part of that initiative, laying the foundational architecture of the data warehouse, was completed and allowed for this integration to occur.

According to Adrian V. Lee, Ph.D., director of the Women’s Cancer Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and Magee-Womens Research Institute, the researchers wanted to know if there was a difference between pre-menopausal and post-menopausal breast cancer.

“We are interested in this question from a research standpoint because we are moving toward personalized medicine, and personalized medicine is all about finding subgroups of patients who have a specific type of disease for which we could develop novel therapies,” Dr. Lee said in a statement.

This effort to integrate different kinds of data is just the start of UPMC’s enterprise analytics initiative. The organization promised to mine all sorts of clinical, genomic, proteomic, imaging and financial data across sources of information across UPMC, UPMC Health Plan and outside entities.