Foundation Medicine this week announced a new partnership with Epic to integrate its genomic profiling and testing services into its electronic health system.

WHY IT MATTERS
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Foundation Medicine offers a suite of genomic profiling assays to identify the molecular alterations of patients' cancers and match them with targeted therapies and clinical trials. With this new collaboration customers will be able to electronically order Foundation tests within the Epic network, directly within the EHR.

The collaboration is aimed at oncology practices, hospitals, academic medical centers and health systems, to enable easy access to clinical and genomic information for more streamlined clinical decision support.

With the new integration, clinical teams can place orders for Foundation's comprehensive genomic profiling tests – and receive and view results – within their existing EHR workflow. The aim is to also reduce data entry while offering faster actionable insights to help physicians guide treatment planning.

The integration is expected to be available in 2022. Foundation Medicine says it is also partnering with organizations using non-Epic EHRs to meet their own oncology needs.

THE LARGER TREND
This isn't the only news this week about genomics-focused precision decision support. On Wednesday, AccessDX Holdings, developer of lab diagnostics and CDS tools, announced its acquisition of 2bPrecise – which helps health systems advance precision medicine by aggregating genomics from labs and clinical information from EHRs – from Allscripts.

Earlier this month, in an interview with Healthcare IT News at HIMSS21, Dr. Robert Bart, chief medical information officer at Pittsburgh-based UPMC, highlighted the necessity of digitized discrete data, integrated into EHR workflows, for precision medicine to work.

"We really think that, when you're moving into the world of pharmacogenomics or genomic medicine, that you really need to embed decision support into your electronic health record," he said. 

"And you have to really insist on taking the results only in digital format. So if we get external results from reference labs, we don't want PDFs. We want to actually discrete data, so we can trigger the decision support, as well as provide supporting content for interpretation by our clinicians – and the content so the patient can understand what that result means for them."

ON THE RECORD
"In order to bring the reality of precision medicine to more cancer patients, we need to simplify the process for getting oncologists access to the genomic insights they need for targeted treatment planning," said Kathleen Kaa, interim chief commercial officer at Foundation Medicine, in a statement about the new Epic integrations.

She called it "one of our key efforts to improve the process for ordering our tests so care teams can focus on providing the best treatment for their patients."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.