Allscripts subsidiary 2bPrecise has partnered with genomics database company PierianDx to create a more comprehensive precision medicine platform for hospitals and health systems in need of genomic-based clinical decision support.

2bPrecise helps hospitals tackle genomic data challenges with its cloud-based EHR-agnostic platform, which can store genomic data from many sources and deliver it -- and relevant clinical information -- at the point of care.

"Whether it's community hospitals or academic medical centers, all of them just have a basic data problem right now," Joel Diamond, MD, chief medical officer of 2bPrecise, told Healthcare IT News this past year, citing one of the biggest hurdles to moving genomic insights into standard clinical practice.

"The fact that you could insert genetic info in an EHR doesn't mean it's in a form that's acceptable and usable for doctors at the point of care," Diamond explained.

For instance, he said, given that a single genomic sequencing could return vast amounts of data, with untold numbers of variants of unknowable significance – but which may or may not need to be retrieved and relayed to the patient as medical knowledge about genetics evolves – electronic health records are not ideal repositories for such data.

Assaf Halevy, founder and CEO of 2bPrecise, said the collaboration with PierianDx will "not simply repurpose clinical and genomic data on the desktop, but also provide the only solution that integrates a patient’s next generation sequencing lab results from commercial and internal labs with relevant and critical clinical information."

The tool can then help with "interpretation and clinical action" based on the scientific and evidence-based content in PierianDx's database – "including previous patients’ outcomes," he added.

With the partnership, 2bPrecise will be able to incorporate evidence-based knowledge from PierianDx's Clinical Genomics WorkSpace platform – enabling analytics, classification, interpretation and reporting right at the point of care, officials said. That could help improve hospitals' ability to move precision medicine more easily into general practice.

The partnership will also "enable a provider to utilize all of a patient’s clinical and genomic data to make treatment and clinical trial decisions," Michael Sanderson, CEO of PierianDx said.

Halevy said the tool will help clinicians make better use of actionable data, offering a "go-to resource to decipher genomic data in a patient-specific and efficient manner."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
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