Dr. West has a really interesting post up over on Happy EMR Doctor about EMR Software and the Human Genome. In the post he talks about a new program to help integrate EHR software with genome data. It’s a 4 year project, but I believe is the start of something groundbreaking.

It’s become quite clear to me over the past year that the EHRs of the future will be far more than patient records as recorded by the doctor. Instead, the EHR of the future will include a whole bunch of outside data that is collected by the patient.

Yesterday, we briefly discussed health-logging and that will be a major source of data that doctors can use to treat patients. However, probably even more powerful could be tying EHR software to a person’s genome data.

Once we understand the genome, we will likely be able to treat patients more effectively. We will be able to diagnose patients with more precision. We will be able to treat future issues before they become issues. Imagine if you could prescribe a drug that was unique to that person’s genome. Pretty cool stuff.

We are a long way from this happening, but I can clearly see that it’s the future of healthcare and the best way to leverage the genomic data is to tie it with the EHR and its clinical decision support system.

Unless someone thinks it might be better to have patients bring in their genome data on paper. Oh wait, last I checked you couldn’t do genomic tracking on paper.