Foundation Medicine, Epic Collaboration Focuses On Genomics

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The EHR integration can help practices, hospitals and academic medical centers access genomic information more easily in the EHR, for more streamlined clinical decision support.

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.