GE Healthcare has taken initial steps to integrate 'omics data into its Centricity electronic medical record system through an exploratory research project that is developing a genomics data analysis infrastructure.

Mark Dente, GE healthcare's chief medical officer for healthcare information technology, discussed the project last week during a panel discussion at the American Medical Informatics Association's Translational Bioinformatics conference in San Francisco.

The panel discussed several projects that are looking to integrate genomics data into EMRs. In addition to Dente, panel participants included representatives from the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network, the Pharmacogenomics Research Network, and the HL7 clinical genomics workgroup.

BioInform spoke to Dente after the conference to get additional details about GE Healthcare's genomics infrastructure development plans. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

During your presentation at AMIA, you mentioned that GE Healthcare is developing a genomics analysis infrastructure. Could you provide some more details about what you hope to develop and where those efforts currently stand?

What we presented at AMIA was a mix of our technologies that we have today like our EMR and our ability to have large datasets to do research against. [T]he genomics effort is where we are headed, [but] it is not a product [now and] it may never become a product.

What we are talking about here is the driving of personalized medicine and translational medicine. I am a biomedical, clinical informaticist ... and my claim to fame is to think about knowledge management and clinical decision support and how we can shorten the ... bench-to-bedside timeline, [which] is about 17 years for something to go from research to full adoption in clinical practice. Now you compound that with a part of medicine that most clinicians in clinical practice are [unfamiliar with]. They learn a little bit of genomics in undergraduate school [and] in medical school but how do you educate folks as to ... where the research is going? Finally, how do we deal with new knowledge repositories in medicine?

A lot of our industry is run on old technology. We've made a large investment on the technology side looking at services-oriented-architecture. We can put legacy systems ... and new technology into this new infrastructure and because is platform we can aggregate data across the institution and even across the community and do analytics on this data in our data warehouse.... this SOA architecture is a modern way of doing that. [We have a] joint venture [with] Microsoft [called Caradigm that is] focused around that and advanced clinical decision support.

The final leg is [the] genomics platform itself One thing around genomics is that there needs to be a higher expectation on the technology's ability to handle large datasets. An SOA infrastructure allows us to be more flexible on the technical side of dealing with genomic information. [Also,] you really want to think about a genomic repository external to the EMR. That is my personal approach and how I will strongly suggest that we as GE will approach this. You do not want to clog up your operational EMR database with genetic data because it's just too large. [Also, because] its genetic data, we need to have a higher expectation of security. We have rigorous HIPAA and other internal standards of how we manage and keep private patient information and that will get ratcheted up in the future.

As you start to put data into a genomics database, we need to marry up the genomic data with the phenotypical data coming off an EMR. The real exciting part [is] we can start looking at the genomic data coupled with the phenotypical data in and a genomic analytic engine concept. With a analytics engine and the creation of algorisms to look for signal how do we start to think about running very targeted studies and [looking] for signals that suggest that these four hypothetical genes, [for example,] could be predictive of a [disease] state?

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Q&A: GE Healthcare's Mark Dente on the Challenges of Integrating Genomics Data with EMRs