One of the nation's more advanced precision health companies is partnering with an EMR platform to develop a personalized care treatment plan for cancer patients.
The partnership between NantHealth and Allscripts, announced March 2, pushes the needle on two fronts. As envisioned, it would give clinicians access to individual genomic (DNA) and transcriptome (RNA) data at the point of care, enabling them to create a specific care plan for each cancer patient; second, it would enable clinicians to gather data from medical devices, both for population health purposes and to monitor patients at home.
The project marries mHealth to so-called precision medicine, a high-tech concept brought into the mainstream by President Barack Obama during his recent State of the Union Address. While much of the talk had been focused around the use of technology to gather and collate genetic data from a patient, projects like the NantHealth/Allscripts collaboration are the first to illustrate how mHealth can be used to connect patients to individual care protocols and give clinicians a platform to manage individual patients around-the-clock and reach large groups of people with similar care coordination needs.
"Our goal is to enable physicians to make better, more informed decisions, provide best-in-class patient care and monitor the effectiveness and progress of treatment, using real-time clinical and pan-omic data never before available," Patrick Soon-Shiong, NantHealth's founder and chief executive officer, said in a press release. "We look forward to working in partnership with the Allscripts team as the first major clinical EMR vendor to take a major advancement towards the interoperability necessary to enable physicians and patients to stay engaged and active - before, during and after treatment - and enable the most appropriate, personalized intervention as early as possible."
The partnership makes use of NantHealth's DeviceConX and Hbox data integration solutions, which collect and manage data from a variety of devices. For cancer patients, the data is combined with NantHealth's eviti clinical decision support tool to create a personalized care plan that take into account their susceptibility to medications and eligibility for the plan.
The platform will also pull in data from the Allscripts EMR and community health data collected across the continuum of care to help clinicians track and manage entire patient populations.
"We're working with NantHealth to create a game-changing platform for coordinated cancer care," Allscripts Chief Executive Officer Paul M. Black said in the press release. "Integrated patient information – from the molecular level and from the entire continuum of care – is a powerful tool to improve healthcare."
The possibilities, as they so often say, are endless. By using a patient's specific genomic data, clinicians can tailor a regimen of cancer protocols and drugs that offers the best possible chance of success in treating the disease – and by tying this program to mobile monitoring devices, can manage and adjust this care management plan whenever necessary. By gathering that data and running it through a provider's EMR, meanwhile, a health system can identify and manage a larger group of patients with the same genetic traits, scaling up an individual care plan into a population management program.
