Situation
To address a growing need for personalized care, a large healthcare organization in Colorado established a precision medicine center, consisting of a hospital biobank which integrated 6 million patient records to leverage existing data and begin looking at healthcare on an individual level. After a couple of years collecting data in the biobank, they realized there was a need for a more sophisticated program with bioinformatics support to scale up analytics and make larger conclusions. Thus, they launched a data warehouse and looked for industry partnerships to better manage, store, and integrate all the data. BC Platforms worked with this healthcare system and created a framework for certified, seamless workflows managing raw genetic data all the way through to report generation. This partnership has now established a comprehensive system in order to deliver in the areas of clinical informatics, bringing samples from collection to genetic testing and into the clinic through a seamless connection between research insights and clinical practice.
Challenge
There are several challenges to leveraging genetic data within the care delivery system:
- It is a laborious process to acquire and become proficient at using most platforms to manage, store, analyse and deliver accurate clinical reports
- Once a framework is established, it is important to include healthcare provider education and create a workflow with regard to using new genetic clinical reports when interfacing with patients
- There is a need for significant interoperability in the system to ensure doctors and patients are aligned and can take advantage of the personalized care framework
- Patients are requesting genetic testing, as they have become increasingly knowledgeable about test results due to an increased prevalence of direct to consumer genetic testing services now readily available
Action
The healthcare organization built a clinical ops team, supported by BC Platforms technology, to address existing challenges, which helped engage and recruit participants in the biobank, automatically monitor reports of consent to recontact, and create an overall robust computing infrastructure for networking and storage of big data. Additionally, they established extensive education for medical professionals around pharmacogenomics and genetic testing, and what the implications of this data are.
Specifically, BC Platforms developed an automated pipeline that enables high-throughput processing of Illumina genotype array data, PGx reporting for clinical decision support, and direct delivery of these results through integration to Electronic Health Records (Epic).
Impact
Operating in the clinical space requires secure and certified workflows, so data can be produced, analysed and reported in a guideline-based fashion. This way, security and access is controlled while researchers run analysis and information continuously flows through.
BC Platforms is one of the first technologies to achieve the integration of genomic data directly into a clinical workflow. With this framework for personalized care:
- Clinicians make more informed conclusions from easy to reference datasets directly feeding into electronic health records
- Better patient outcomes and personalized therapies are made possible by scalable, more efficient automated data processing pipelines
- Data is secure and compliant with HIPAA regulations and enables a CLIA-certified environment
- Customized storage fuels efficiency in analysis off the cloud or on premise