GenomeWeb: Children's Mercy Kansas City Brings Pharmacogenomic Testing In-House
By Jessica Kim Cohen
Children's Mercy Kansas City has developed and launched its own 13-gene pharmacogenomic panel that it runs in-house, citing easier integration into clinical workflows and a desire to cut down on wait times.
The Missouri-based pediatric hospital system has been conducting PGx testing for years to guide prescribing decisions, primarily within its GOLDILOKs Clinic, where pediatricians and pharmacists meet with patients and families with complex medication needs, such as those who have experienced adverse reactions to medications or who aren't responding to standard treatment. Providers consider various factors, including PGx, to pinpoint the "just right" medication and dose.
PGx describes how mutations in certain genes can affect patients' ability to metabolize medications, information that can help physicians decide which drugs to prescribe. Genetics-guided prescribing ideally identifies drugs patients may want to steer clear of based on the risk of potential side effects and efficacy concerns, without the patient needing to try it out and experience those issues firsthand.
For the decade that Children's Mercy has been running the GOLDILOKs Clinic, PGx testing has been conducted by external labs, until this fall.
Providers at Children's Mercy realized they could gain efficiencies by bringing PGx testing in-house: creating their own genetic testing panel with variants of interest for its patient population, running the tests in the hospital system's own molecular genetics lab to have better control over turnaround time, and integrating genetic results directly into the electronic health record (EHR) system.
The test Children's Mercy launched internally, dubbed Kiddose PGx, "is a targeted genotyping test that we custom-designed," explained Laura Ramsey, co-lead of the Kiddose PGx program and section chief for individualized therapeutics in Children's Mercy's division of clinical pharmacology. Children's Mercy has said it is the first pediatric hospital in Missouri to offer in-house pharmacogenomic testing.
Read the full article via GenomeWeb