Future of EHR and the Human Genome

Dr. West has a really interesting post up over on Happy EMR Doctor about EMR Software and the Human Genome. In the post he talks about a new program to help integrate EHR software with genome data. It’s a 4 year project, but I believe is the start of something groundbreaking.

It’s become quite clear to me over the past year that the EHRs of the future will be far more than patient records as recorded by the doctor. Instead, the EHR of the future will include a whole bunch of outside data that is collected by the patient.

Yesterday, we briefly discussed health-logging and that will be a major source of data that doctors can use to treat patients. However, probably even more powerful could be tying EHR software to a person’s genome data.

Once we understand the genome, we will likely be able to treat patients more effectively. We will be able to diagnose patients with more precision. We will be able to treat future issues before they become issues. Imagine if you could prescribe a drug that was unique to that person’s genome. Pretty cool stuff.

We are a long way from this happening, but I can clearly see that it’s the future of healthcare and the best way to leverage the genomic data is to tie it with the EHR and its clinical decision support system.

Unless someone thinks it might be better to have patients bring in their genome data on paper. Oh wait, last I checked you couldn’t do genomic tracking on paper.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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