Kaiser Permanente and Geisinger Explore How
Data Can Customize Care

Organizations like Kaiser Permanente and Geisinger Health System are asking how they can mine the “treasure trove” of research-quality data stored in Epic to customize patients’ care plans on an individual level.

At Geisinger, gene scans have been added to Epic records for more than 50,000 patients. So far, about 3.5% of the scans show easy-to-identify variants that indicate serious health issues and impact clinicians’ treatment plans. Chief scientific officer Dr. David Ledbetter knows that percentage will grow, and he wants to have the data already in Epic when it does. “It will be possible to sequence all the genes of individual patients, store that information in the electronic medical record, and it will guide and individualize and optimize patient care,” he predicts.

Meanwhile, Kaiser Permanente is customizing care through crowdsourcing. Dr. Tracy Lieu, the head of research at KP Oakland, wants to use surveys to create subjective data that clinicians and patients can reference to make personal decisions. “Patients are always saying, don’t just give me the averages, tell me what happened to others who look like me and made the same treatment decisions I did,” Lieu says. “And tell me not only did they live or die, but tell me what their quality of life was about.” With this survey push, Lieu and other clinicians there hope to use Epic to integrate data about patients’ emotional states with objective trends and outcomes.

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