In an interactive session at Becker's 11th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, James Lu, MD, PhD, CEO of Helix, a company that partners with health systems and other organizations to implement enterprise-wide genomics programs, led a discussion on the future of genomics in healthcare.
Speakers also included:
- Mike LeBeau, MD, System Vice President and Chief of Health Services Operations at Sioux Falls, S.D. - based Sanford Health
- Andy Danielson, Chair of Mayo Clinic Ventures, Rochester, Minn. - based Mayo Clinic's research and technology commercialization arm
These early adopters of genomics agreed on the inevitability of genomics becoming a standard part of care and shared key learnings that enabled them to make genomics more available to their provider and patient population, as well as their broader communities. Moreover, the discussion included a review of some of the challenges that remain, including the cost of generating and storing large amounts of data, the need for data analytics to make sense of the data, and the difficulty of integrating genomics into everyday clinical practice. They stressed the need for medical education to include genomics and for clinical guidelines to continuously be updated to incorporate all that’s being learned about how genomics can impact clinical care for better patient outcomes. Finally, they highlighted the importance of partnerships in overcoming these challenges, with a focus on aligning values and ensuring patient privacy.
Key takeaways:
1: The cost of generating sequence data has significantly decreased, and continues to decrease over time, allowing for broader application and utilization within healthcare that has positively impacted the general population. But that's only one piece of the puzzle.
Andy Danielson: "I think we're heading in close to that sub-$100 genome… You can see it coming. So, it's almost like we're past that first question onto one that's even more pressing, which is we're going to be able to create a lot of sequence data for relatively low cost, but then what? First, you've got to pay to store it. Then it's okay, massive amount of data, how do we assess it, analyze it in a way that is first of all, correct, second doesn't have any disparities in care and bias underneath it? And third, how do you bring that promise of impactful clinical decision support?"
2: The challenge lies in analyzing and utilizing the massive amount of sequence data effectively in clinical care which if enabled or merged with patients’ EMR records could drastically help to improve patient care.
Dr. Mike LeBeau: "It’s one thing to collect your data, but it’s also how do you aggregate it and how do you spend your time truly thinking about what it means and including it in decision-making… We have a lot of data and we're not sure how it's going to truly change the standard of care. And that's really what I'm most excited about. But if you think about transitioning from where we are today to that insight of where we're going to be, I think we have to train differently. I think it has to live at the med school level, it has to be in residencies. Once we start turning out a generation of folks that truly understand this data, I think it is there. … If it's truly going to be standard of care, it has to live in the physician's office, whether you're a pediatrician, a family practitioner, an internal medicine doc, an OB-GYN doc, just for that true preemptive screening."
3: As health systems increasingly recognize the impact genomics can make to improve patient care, they are exploring approaches to incorporate it into their strategic framework and finding partnerships to leverage expertise and resources in the genomics field.
AD: "You can go on a journey and try and figure things out yourself, and there's value in that, or you can go with a partner who's learned a lot of things the hard way that you don't have to learn. And again, that's the approach we take… we will do work with a partner, but also bring in a partner who’s learned a lot of hard lessons that we don’t have to learn "
ML: “Our ultimate goal was to take that data and make it clinical and we’ve improved. But we realized that we need to partner with experts to make sure that we’re at the table as we start to think about taking data and implementing it across our system... we also don’t think the data would be powerful enough if we sit with it ourselves.”
4: Trust and privacy are paramount when it comes to getting buy-in from patients to share and utilize genomic data, as is, finding partners that hold the same values and culture that are integral to your organization.
AD: "When we talk about generating this data from patients and sharing it with partners, there’s nothing more important than doing it the right way. At the end of our day, all we have is our credibility with our patients…we've told all of our partners we're going to first and foremost do our work with the best interests of the patient in mind, and then we're going to build the best businesses we can, not the other way around. We're not going to say, well, we could make a lot of money if we did this and we'll figure out patient privacy. No, it's we're going to first do the most robust and ironclad data privacy for our patients, and then we're going to build the best business we can… Choosing the right partner that shares your values is beyond critical."