Dr Michael Thompson Outlines Challenges With the Mass Adoption of EHRs, Precision Medicine

We know that there are a lot of problems with precision medicine and lots of areas that we need to define better, but that shouldn’t stop us from moving forward and trying to optimize the care for our patients, said Michael Thompson, MD, PhD, FASCO, Aurora Advanced Healthcare.

Transcript

What challenges are associated with the mass adoption of EHRs and precision medicine?

There are a number of issues around electronic health records that are separate from just precision medicine. But for precision medicine, it’s how do you get this 20-page PDF that has a dashboard summary, that has all this information, how do you get that into an electronic format with discrete variables that you can search and do something with, and that is one of the challenges as we were recently discussing today: how do you make all of that happen? And there are different companies trying approaches.

We have purchased, and are trying to implement Syapse to do that, but within one molecular testing vendor, you can go to individual portals they have to find out some of that information, and sometimes they will give you downloads of electronic information. But, I think the big idea is how do you get all of that information from one site, like our place, and share it across the country? And that’s a part of the Biden Moonshot initiative, is to try to break down the silos so we gain information faster, so we aren’t making the same mistakes over years. We’re learning in weeks and months what people are doing. So, I’d say that there are a variety of vendors and approaches trying to do this, but it’s still very much a work in progress, and it’s still very early on.

I tweeted out at this meeting, 11 sides of my thoughts on precision medicine, and I think we know a number of things: we know that precision medicine works and there’s a lot of examples where it's standard of care. We know precision medicine doesn’t work including BRAF inhibition in colorectal cancer. We have to combine it with other therapies, and we know that there are a lot of problems with precision medicine and lots of areas that we need to define better. But, that shouldn’t stop us from moving forward and trying to optimize the care for our patients. And we realized that sometimes we don’t have enough data, but we’re trying to move as fast as we can to help people.