In order to give patients the most appropriate care, personalised medicine needs to take into account a wide variety of genetic information.

Interview with Mark Hoffman, Director of the Center for Health Insights at the University of Missouri Kansas City, who specialises in bacteriology and personalised medicine, following his lecture entitled Big Data, Little Data and Personalised Medicine during the World of Health (WoHIT 2014) conference which took place in the French city of Nice on 2-4 April.

Mark Hoffman: When we use this term were usually talking about advanced biological testing such as genomics or proteomics (Editors note: study of proteins, particularly their structures and functions in cells and tissue). Personalised medicine basically means using as much information as possible on a patient in order to take the best clinical decision. The aim is to provide the patient with the most appropriate treatment, in accordance with his/her precise genetic information.

Well, the alternative to discrete genetic data is the approach thats in current use a number of written reports and scanned documents, i.e. formats which cannot be read by machines. Discrete genetic test results are stored electronically in a single file. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) pulls these different types of discrete genetic test resultstogether, which should be much more useful for practitioners. As Vice-President at Cerner, I approved an initiative to develop an information system for the laboratory which would generate discrete genetic test results. And this system is now being used in more than 25 genetic testing laboratories worldwide.

The most important innovation will be the use of these various types of genetic tests in clinical practice. We need results which prove how useful these tests are in a clinical situation. And when that happens, the use of the tests will grow and the demand for them from technology platforms will increase.

Well, digital systems protect patient confidentiality better than paper medical files. Access to them can be managed in a far more secure way. So I dont think there are any real issues around the confidentiality of genetic data in patients electronic clinical files. There might perhaps be an exception where the impact of the results of genetic tests goes beyond the individual patients situation. When you learn something about yourself, you realise all the effects this has or might have on those around you your wife, your brother, your aunt, and so on.

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[WoHIT] Use of various types of genetic tests in clinical practice set to be a major innovation