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The future of personalized medicine will depend on Health IT

Malorye Allison is right on spot when she writes that the success of personalized medicine will depend on promoting Health IT. The uptake of pharmacogenetics (PGx) to the clinic has been frustratingly slow, even that the field is now at least 50 years old.
See: Gurwitz D, Motulsky AG. ‘Drug reactions, enzymes, and biochemical genetics’: 50 years later. Pharmacogenomics. 8:1479-1484 (2007)

A key reason is that pharmacogenetics diagnostic tests (PGx Dx) are very expensive – way too expensive for most people to afford unless the health providers pay. But so far health providers are not enthusiastic either – most PGx Dx tests are too costly even for them, and not yet clearly proven to be cost-effective for the health providers.

However, with the exception of testing tumor tissues, PGx Dx are ‘once in a lifetime tests’ because our genome is stable. Therefore, with improved Health IT in place, PGx Dx will be far more cost-effective. One test will suffice for a life time, even if the patient moves to another health provider or even migrates to another country.

A cool example of how Health IT can promote personalized medicine is The ALERT project. This European research project, which is a consortium effort, aims to develop an innovative IT system to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs), supplementing spontaneous reporting systems. To achieve this objective, ALERT will exploit clinical data from electronic healthcare records (EHRs) of over 30 million patients from several European countries (The Netherlands, Denmark, United Kingdom, and Italy). Further information about this project (in which I participate) is available here:
http://www.alert-project.org/

David Gurwitz, PhD
Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry
Sackler Faculty of Medicine
Tel-Aviv University
Tel-Aviv 69978 Israel
E-mail: gurwitz(at)post.tau.ac.il

A current topic discussed in the literature is the concept of a medical home. If this is ever to reach its full potential, information technolgy must be the foundation of this integrated practice model

For more information on the trends which are driving a reformation of primary care practice, see my series of blogs at ” actionforbetterhealthcare.com.

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