The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sponsored a meeting in San Diego yesterday that aimed to map future funding and research opportunities for personalized health, including preventive, genomic-research based medicine and wireless monitoring applications and services. The session included representatives from Intel, Google, Qualcomm and Cisco Systems.
Stanford professor of bioengineering, genetics and medicine Russ Altman told attendees that services that sequence patients' entire genomes will become available in 10 to 15 years. Altman noted that this influx of raw data increases the opportunity for health IT companies because "anybody who is interested in genomic research also is a huge fan of electronic health care databases."
The prospect of truly personalized medicine inches closer once genomic research can provide information about a particular patient's genetic pre-dispositions. Couple the genetic backstory with real-time biometric information gleaned from wirelessly connected devices, and it is even closer.
Of course, the stimulus money for EHR implementation also came up: Qualcomm's Don Jones told Xconomy.com that the real value of EHRs will be realized once they are integrated with medical diagnostic tests, mHealth monitoring tools and software that can translate the hard data into diagnoses.
