How can the emerging patient-centric health records lower costs in pharmacogenomics?

Abstract

The costs of clinical trials in which the subjects' inherited and somatic genetic variations are taken into consideration are higher than those trials where no genetic data are used. The higher costs are due to increased complexity in exploring clinical and genomic factors, as well as the need to coordinate the various outputs of disparate entities, such as clinical and genetic laboratories, and infer significant associations between genotype and phenotype observations. Environment, diet and lifestyle factors, in addition to clinical data, can all affect a person's response to medicines and thus there is a need to obtain the complete health history of a subject enrolled in a clinical trial in order to assert the right genotype-phenotype associations. Such complete histories can be made available through the emerging patient-centric health records, and challenges concerning these records, such as sustainability, usability and governance, are discussed in this paper. © 2007 Future Medicine Ltd.