Cerner Pilots Study Using Genetic Info To Boost Health

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Employees volunteer DNA to help build program to help improve individual health.

Cerner Corp., a healthcare technology company that builds systems to share data among doctors, hospitals, and patients, is looking to branch out into actual healthcare, according to the Kansas City Star.

In a pilot program, Cerner is collecting the voluntary DNA data from its employees to show genetic information can help prevent illnesses or reduce their long-term effects and save overall healthcare costs. Eighty-two Cerner employees turned over their entire DNA profile to the company for the study.

The global, next-generation sequencing market is expected to hit $14 billion by 2024, buoyed by advances in companion diagnostics and biomarkers for use in treating cancer, according to a report by Grand View Research.

The idea behind the study is that “the person is at the center of healthcare,” Cerner president Zane Burke told the Kansas City Star. “How do we use the power of all this health data and the tool sets we’ve built? How do we practically use it to help people live?

“We’re now able to take vast amounts of data, upload that data, run programs against that data — diabetes protocol, care management protocol — and see how we identify people who need intervention. We need to understand the whole phone book, but get down to the personal level.”

While Cerner was founded to provide services that could establish cost reduction and elimination of duplicate services, it has become clear that those steps can’t happen unless the population as a whole adopts better self-care. And that means going beyond collection of data to personalization of it.

“The personal element is what we’re after,” said David Nill, chief medical officer in the Cerner Healthe Clinic, which operates on Cerner’s headquarters campus to serve Cerner employees. “Broad programs fail, but with genetic information we can tell people they’re built differently, so they may need to do something different.”

In the Cerner study, diet and health coaches will sit down with program participants to determine whether or not they are more likely than the general population to suffer from four specific conditions like obesity, metabolic syndrome, osteoporosis and depression. The participants’ DNA profile from their 23 pairs of chromosomes will have been run through complex algorithms created by Doug McNair, president of the Cerner Math division, and his colleagues.

“We know there are variations in genes that affect those conditions,” McNair said. “We know this from the research literature and from Cerner’s own prior genomics studies.”

Cerner’s mission is to improve health care delivery by making people healthier, and that starts with taking responsibility for one’s own health by having good information. “The majority of people want that kind of intervention,” said Burke. “We’re impacting the people who want to engage in their health. But some need incentives to engage. So we’re working with health providers and their plans … because the key is to engage before you have a problem.”