Patient genetics the basis for Mount Sinai prescription support tool

A new clinical decision support platform created by providers at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York aims to help doctors personalize the prescription process for their patients.

The platform will take advantage of patients' genetic information, obtained via saliva samples, to predict the potential impact of certain drugs in their bodies. It is being pilot tested through the hospital's Clinical Implementation of Personalized Medicine through Electronic health Records and Genomics (CLIPMERGE) program, which will communicate with Mount Sinai's EHR system, according to an announcement.

The genetic variations will be stored on the platform, and will be the basis for alerts automatically sent to providers when prescribed medications have a higher risk of side effects for that particular patient.

Roughly 1,500 Mount Sinai patients were invited to participate in the initial pilot, according to the hospital. An article published online in the journal Nature describes how the platform will work.

"What has been lacking to date is technology that can enable us to effectively implement pharmacogenomic information at the point of care and sufficient knowledge about how this information should be communicated to doctors," lead author and principal investigator of CLIPMERGE Omri Gottesman, said in a statement. "We hope that through CLIPMERGE, we can establish best practices both technological and human; and a robust process for clinical-decision support to deliver relevant genomic information to physicians at the moment they are caring for patients."

Physicians who use their electronic health record's clinical decision support tools were viewed more negatively by patients, according to a study published in January in the journal Medical Decision Making. The researchers found that patients viewed physicians who used such tools as less capable than those who made judgments without the computerized tools or those who chose to consult a colleague.

The patients whose physicians used the tools also were more dissatisfied, leaving the door open to less compliance with treatment recommendations, according to the researchers.

To learn more:
- here's the Mount Sinai announcement
- read the Nature article (subscription required)