Below is an excerpt from the podcast. Listen to the full episode here.
Question: How is data and informatics evolving at Geisinger?
David Vawdrey: We are 20 to 25 years into having the same electronic health record, and that gives us tremendous luxury of not being a newcomer to the space. We’re in a good place in terms of our EHR assets, experience and expertise. I’m really focused beyond just the transactional nature of the EHR from a data perspective, and now we focus a lot on population health management. We focus a lot on patient engagement as well. We were one of the first organizations to throw open the chart and promote using OpenNotes, [a communication platform].
We wondered: How do you make information available to people? How do you collect information back from patients and members of our health plan? How do you, in the current generation of monitoring at home, generate troves of data? The data in and of itself is not particularly useful unless you can extract the insight.
We also have a fabulous genomics program that has enrolled [around] 280,000 members who have consented to participate in the research trial. We’ve got full exome sequence data for over 140,000 of those participants, and we feed that information back into the EHR. We reach out to patients and individuals who have concerning findings in their genome. It’s really the synthesis of data.
You asked about the evolution of data. It’s the coming together of the genotypic data and phenotypic data from the EHR claims, along with social determinants data and patient-reported or generated data, that together gives us a much more comprehensive picture [of patients] than anything we’ve had in the past.
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