Currrent Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) systems are incapable of handling the genomic data, however some of the system may be able to be modified to support genomics clinical decision support (CDS) coming out of ancillary systems.

At least then doctors could benefit from the latest genomic advances without having to depend on re-engineering and updates from EMR vendors.

To give you an idea of the size of the data requirements let’s compare a medical image to a medical record.

A medical image is approximately 300 times the size of a medical report it is based on it.  A whole genome sequence of an individual requires up to 5-10

gigabytes of storage.  This is roughly 50 times more than an image.

Data or image size is the reason images aren’t sent to a RIS.  Radiology Information Systems were designed to hold radiology reports, not the images.  The same can be said for genomic data and EHRs.  Electronic Health Records were never designed to hold massive amounts of data.

As a result we need to rely on ancillary systems to store and manage the data and then pass on the meta data to CDS systems.  In turn the CDS systems can be integrated with EHRs and EMRs.

Click here to read the original article on Genomics Drive Healthcare and EMRs

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