Planning an Enterprise Archive (VNA) to Accommodate Collaboration in Precision Medicine

By Jeff Fleming

By Jeff Fleming

Impact on healthcare information systems for CIOs

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines precision medicine as an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person.

Like many of the broad healthcare initiatives supported with major funding from the U.S. government, this one will have an impact on how the healthcare enterprise provides access to information to the clinicians who collaborate to make precision medicine work in practice as well as in theory.

Genomic information is stored and shared in a number of formats – PDF, Variant Call Format (VCF) and DICOM images – developed by bioinformatics specialists. Planning to store and provide enterprise distribution to this body of documents, images and reports is a key part of planning for today’s Enterprise Archive (VNA). Because it is often the repository of choice for images requiring distribution across an enterprise, the VNA is a logical system for facilitating the distribution of genomic material to the stakeholders in precision medicine.

Information requirements for integrating genomic information into the healthcare enterprise

“Integrating genomic information into clinical care and the electronic health record can facilitate personalized medicine through genetically guided clinical decision support,” reports an article in Genetics in Medicine. The article goes on to identify stakeholders as clinicians, patients, staff, scientists, policy makers, citizens, industry and domain experts from genetics, informatics, and bioethics and related fields.

With President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative and Vice President Biden’s cancer “moonshot”, collaboration around genomic information is of critical importance. Carestream advises CIOs planning for enterprise information management to anticipate the potential lifecycle of this genomic and molecular information so that it can be efficiently managed from the outset. Some of the genomic files are extremely large—a human genome can take up 200 Gigabytes of data—so the way these files are stored and accessed can have a real impact on the design of an organization’s healthcare information storage and access.

#VNA #EHR #genetics

Jeff Fleming is Carestream’s Vice President of Sales and Services for Healthcare Information Systems

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