Mike Murray, Director of Clinical Genomics, Geisinger Health System
Chapters:
0:00 GenomeFIRST Medicine
6:11 Do many providers have their own biobank?
7:08 What variants are you screening for?
10:12 Any pushback from patients or doctors?
18:53 What makes Geisinger so forward looking?
Mike Murray and the crew over at Geisinger are making the implementation of genomic medicine look down right easy.
In today’s interview, Mike explains GenomeFIRST Medicine, a program at the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania to offer care “that is based on an individual’s DNA sequence.” The healthcare provider boasts its own biobank and has partnered up with Regeneron’s Genome Center to offer exome screening to self selected patients. As of DNA Day last year, April 25th 2016, 100,000 recruits had signed up.
What has made Geisinger, who was selected to join the nation Precision Medicine Initiative, so successful with genomics? Mike points to the leadership.
“We have incredible support from the highest levels of the organization. As we’ve rolled out genomics, they are supportive and interested. As long as we’re there to explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, we have them on our side,” he says.
Has there been any pushback from doctors or patients?
Mike says one of the challenges they hadn’t really considered has been a “naming issue.” Sometimes one of the variants a patient tests positive for “puts their clinical story together.” But other patients may test positive for something like lynch syndrome, for example, who haven’t really had any problems.
“They really don’t have lynch syndrome, “ he says, "they have a genetic variant that goes with it. Until they have problems associated with it, they just have risk for lynch syndrome. So the problem is how do you keep something like that high enough on the radar that people and their providers know what to look for, but not so high that insurers or other entities might say, we’re going to treat them like our standard approach to lynch syndrome?”
In fact, Mike and his team have thought quite far through this challenge of how to report genomic findings back to patients. He explains what they’ve come up with in this beautifully clear interview about one of America’s most genomically experienced and progressive health systems.
