Event Summary
Personalized medicine can offer better-targeted treatments, health system cost savings and an enhanced understanding of care options’ comparative effectiveness. This health care model would be further enhanced by the use of information technology to aggregate health care data so that researchers can develop a new understanding of what types of therapies will work for what types of people. But as government stimulus funds for health information technology are spent, what can be done to ensure that new systems are capable of handling, sharing and analyzing the genetic and outcomes data needed to promote the continued development of personalized medicine? What policies are needed to ensure that the public investment in health information technology supports new paradigms – like personalized medicine – rather than just automating and capturing medical practices of the past?
Event Information
When
Friday, January 28, 2011
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Where
Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map
On January 28, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings hosted a policy discussion focused on the challenges of enabling personalized medicine, as well as the policy and operational changes that would facilitate connectivity, integration, reimbursement reform and secondary analysis of information. Vice President and Director of Governance Studies Darrell West presented key findings and recommendations from his forthcoming paper about the public policy actions needed to ensure that health information technology facilitates the adoption of personalized medicine in the U.S. healthcare system. David Brailer, chairman of Health Evolution Partners and the first "health information czar” during the Bush administration, delivered a keynote address.
After the program, speakers took audience questions.
Transcript
DARRELL WEST:This week in his State of the Union Address, President Obama highlighted the importance of innovation for long-term economic development. He made the argument that innovation is vital for job creation and building the industries of tomorrow.
Areas that offer tremendous hope in this regard are genomics, medicine, and the life sciences. Scientists have cracked the human genome and are identifying genetic markers associated with particular diseases. This has fueled efforts to personalize medicine and target treatments in a more effective manner. With these advances, we’re learning how to tailor treatments based on individual’s genetic structures.
Yet there remain several barriers to progress in this area. Some national policies were developed years before these recent advances in chain sequencing, electronic health records, and information technology. And so as a result, we’ve not taken full advantage of the opportunities that we face.
Today we are putting out a paper that makes a number of recommendations and I just want to summarize the highlights of that. I’ll refer you to the actual paper for additional details. But we argue that it is vital to connect genomic and other personalized information to electronic health records. Electronic health records and other electronic documents are moving to center stage in medical care. The administration has invested more than $40 billion in that effort.
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Participants
Keynote Speaker
David Brailer
Chairman
Health Evolution Partners
Panelists
Paul Billings
Chief Medical Officer
Life Technologies Corp.
Mark Boguski
Associate Professor
Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
Emad Rizk
President
McKesson Health Solutions
Donald W. Rucker
Vice President and Chief Medical Officer
Siemens Medical Solutions USA