Abstract
“One advantage of the VA is the very good electronic health records,” said Catherine Chanfreau-Coffinier, a research health scientist at the Veteran's Administration Informatics Computing Infrastructure in Salt Lake City. “Plus, testing can be centralized in a national lab, and the people have been treated for a very long time.” One new VA project, called PHASER Program, will provide pharmacogenomic testing for veterans by making use of this wide net of treatment. Working with Sanford Imagenetics, which offers a genetic screening test, the program will be free for current VA patients.
By 2022, PHASER will test 250,000 U.S. vets from 100 locations. “For patients with a genetic variant, a provider prescribing a drug would get an alert if this patient has a dangerous phenotype,” Chanfreau-Coffinier explained. “It might suggest that the prescriber talk to a pharmacist or use a different medication.”
To make the most use of pharmacogenomics, more healthcare systems must create this kind of large dataset. In the case of the PHASER program, the VA notes that it could take up to two weeks to get the results from a vet's test. So, collecting data in advance of needing the information will be necessary in the future.
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