New research suggests that healthcare organizations are getting increasingly serious about the deployment of precision medicine informatics.
According to a study appearing in the Journal of Precision Medicine and co-sponsored by XIFIN, 76% of respondents had invested in precision medical informatics (PMI), 18% said that they hadn’t made such investments but were planning to do so, 9% were just beginning plans and 6% had completed their PMI plans.
When asked what key business drivers prompted their PMI investments, 66.2% cited patient outcomes, 50% patient safety and 51.5% business strategy. Other areas of interest included customer needs, while 34% to 38% of participants listed quality, business efficiency, process optimization and cost savings as business drivers.
Notably, few of the respondents seem to see PMI as a net gain financially, with revenue generation and financial stability being cited by less 30% of those taking the survey.
Popular technologies involving PMI included provider-facing clinical analytical solutions, real-world data aggregation technology, business intelligence tools and clinical data warehouse solutions are being used more frequently than expected.
However, nearly 60% of respondents to the recent survey said that their enterprise systems, including their EMRs and EHRs, didn’t meet or only partially met the needs of precision medicine users.
Challenges related to deploying PMI included having analytics across clinical, diagnostic, claims and financial data, developing the capacity to curate and annotate unstructured data and achieving integration and interoperability.
These limitations might have an impact on whether providers can successfully roll out next-gen PMI solutions, including care team collaboration, tools referring patients to certified genetic counselors, biomedical analytics, clinical decision support, provider-facing clinical analytics solutions and quality reporting.
Challenges organizations must tackle to create patient-facing physician applications include having the right EMR capabilities, having real-time access to patient data within the care team collaboration software and generating customized patient reports.
Regardless, PMI technologies seem to have a bright future. Nearly 30% of respondents said that their PMI initiative value was greater than or significantly exceeded the value of other technology investments. Not only that, more than 70% of survey participants reported that the PMI value exceeded, significantly exceeded or was close to meeting their initial expectations.
As promising as these applications are, we are still far from the day when precision medicine data is integrated into a physician’s daily workflow. There’s a lot to work out here. That being said, it looks like hospitals are taking the concept very seriously, and that represents a watershed event on its own.
