How to bring precision medicine into the doctor's office

Across the globe, researchers devote enormous amounts of time and effort to understand how human genes impact health and billions of dollars are invested. The knowledge of what impact specific genes have on our health has increased tremendously and continues to do so at an amazing pace. Our increased understanding of genes, and how they affect our health, is driving novel methods to halt diseases and new ways of thinking about how medications can be developed to treat diseases.

With all this money and effort being expended, why isn’t the use of your genetic information a standard part of your medical care? As the Kaiser Permanente Fellow to the World Economic Forum’s Precision Medicine Team, I recently had the opportunity to interview leaders from every aspect of Precision Medicine to understand the barriers preventing genetic testing from becoming a standard part of your healthcare.

These interviews suggest that the science behind genetic testing and the knowledge of how genes impact health is far ahead of our ability to make full use of this information in healthcare. Moving genetic testing into your doctor’s office requires a complex set of technologies, processes, knowledge and payments. Though many of the barriers inhibiting this movement were unique and complex, there were some consistent and common themes:

1. The limited expertise in genetics within healthcare systems
2. The lack of sufficient genetic counsellors
3. To successfully embed genetics into your care, doctors need the workflows for genetic testing (receiving results and understanding the impact on their care plans) to become a seamless part of their work
4. Coverage of payments for genetic testing

The full World Economic Forum article can be viewed at this link.