CAMBRIDGE, MA- Hospitals will now be able to complete on-site genetic testing and integrate that data with their own information systems as a result of a new technology partnership between Cerner Corp, Protedyne and Correlagen Diagnostics, Inc.

Outsourcing of genetic tests for patients can incur significant costs for hospitals. “With [this collaboration], hospitals can bring testing in-house to improve turnaround time in getting information into clinical hands, reduce costs, improve control and provide more information for research,” said J.P. Fingado, vice president and general manager at Cerner.

The technology package includes Protodyne’s Radius robot, Correlagen’s GeneExplorer genetic testing software and Cerner’s Millenium PathNet Helix software, which integrates everything with a hospital’s electronic medial record system.  

Correlagen provides testing software for a wide range of diseases, medical subspecialties and gene types. Fitting on a tabletop, the Radius robot can run multiple genetic tests to provide clinicians with results for patient diseases and drug responses. Protodyne scaled down its robotic technology, originally made for industrial laboratory environments, to make it easier and less expensive for hospitals to use.

With Cerner’s software, patient genetic results can be available, via the hospital’s electronic medical record, at any hospital workstation or as a printed report. Cerner has tailored its platform to meet the specific needs of molecular testing based on the workflow pattern and the number of data prints, according to Fingado. “From a hospital standpoint, it personalizes their testing abilities, which is an attractive thing,” he said.

Cerner will be the exclusive distributor of Correlagen’s GeneExplorer, and Fingado expects clients to be hospitals of various sizes and types, research facilities and genetic testing laboratories.

Peter Massaro, chief technical officer at Protodyne, explains that this combination of all the right technologies expedites the analysis process for a hospital geneticist. “If there is a sick patient with a strange genetic disease, the hospital can provide test results in three or four days instead of three or four months.”