The federal Precision Medicine Initiative is gaining momentum, according to an ONC blog post by U.S. Chief Scientist Teresa Zayas Caban and ONC Health Scientist Administrator Kevin Chaney.
The Precision Medicine Initiative is a national research project, which seeks to improve clinical care through large-scale analysis of genetic, environmental and lifestyle data. In the blog post, titled "The Precision Medicine Era is Dawning," the authors detail three projects ONC launched over the past year, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health.
Here are three notes on the projects.
Sync for Science. Boston-based Harvard Medical School joined forces with EHR vendors — including Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, drchrono, Epic and McKesson — to develop, test and implement application programming interfaces within patient portals. These APIs will enable patients to securely access and share clinical data with the NIH's All of Us Research Program.
Sync for Science Privacy and Security. ONC and NIH are collaborating to independently assess whether Sync for Science's API pilots have implemented appropriate privacy and security principals. The two organizations will validate necessary safeguards and provide privacy and security tips to facilitate secure sharing of EHR clinical data.
Sync for Genes. Five pilot groups, including health IT companies and healthcare providers, are testing a set of clinical genomics standards to streamline genomic data sharing. These pilot groups will give feedback about the standards, which the ONC will use to create open-source validation scripts and implementation guidance documents.
Click here to view the blog post.