When it comes to moving into the sphere of healthcare, Ancestry isn't just working to win over patients. The direct-to-consumer genealogy company wants to reach their doctors, too.
During the recent HLTH conference in Las Vegas, Ancestry announced a $1 million grant to Wolters Kluwer, an incumbent provider of the software UpToDate, which offers doctors evidence-based medical information on 11,600 topics across 25 specialties.
About 1.7 million clinicians use the reference guide, officials said.
The funding will be aimed at allowing UpToDate to independently develop information for healthcare providers to help them interpret and act on the results of genetic testing. It reflects Ancestry's commitment to working with healthcare providers as it moves into the genetic testing space, Chief Scientific Officer Catherine Ball told FierceHealthcare in an interview at the conference.
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Earlier this month, Ancestry launched AncestryHealth, announcing it will offer consumers genotype and next-generation genetic sequencing services, which are more comprehensive genetic tests. The tests, which start at $149, are not reviewed or approved by the Food and Drug Administration. They are ordered by an independent team of physicians to determine eligibility.
Ancestry was responding to consumer demand by launching the service, Ball said. "They've been asking: 'You have my DNA test. Tell me, what else do you know?'" Ball said. "There's been a lot of interest in health. People are interested in what genetics can say about their health."
The science is also getting better, Ball said. "At our scale, that has been an enormous challenge that's been pretty thrilling to attack," she said. The company wanted to make those offerings available at a price point that is "affordable to regular people."
The company put a lot of effort into understanding that the results provided by Ancestry may prompt an information-gathering process that takes place outside of Ancestry, Ball said. "We have to be setting our customer and their healthcare provider up for a very successful healthcare conversation," Ball said.
Most people will not have an actionable finding in their test results. But when someone does have an actionable result, there are a number of different ways for them to get information, whether it be from a genetic counselor or online resources, she said.
"One of the things that's really important about the way we envision this product and our relationship with our customers is that we want not to just give people a long laundry list of genetic reports and risks and say 'Good luck to you,'" Ball said. "We want to be very clear, the No. 1 thing, if you do nothing else, is: 'Print this out. Take it to your physician.'"
The document patients print out was designed to be familiar to physicians by following the format of lab reports physicians already receive from CLIA-certified labs. However, Ball reiterated Ancestry's tests are not diagnostic but aimed at sparking important conversations.
As an example, one of Ball's children learned through a genetic test that she has a mutation that puts her at higher risk for clots.
"It was very difficult to get that into her medical records. So instead I had to actually write a pretty hefty check to get an unreimbursed clinical test so that she could get that into her medical records," Ball said. "But I did it because unless you have that information as part of your clinical path, you can't act on it. Your physician can't act on it when the time comes. It needs to be something you can take action about otherwise you won't be able to improve your health outcome or the outcome of other people in your family. At the end of the day, that's what we want to do."