HL7 and Personalized Medicine Part 1: It starts with Family Health History

Grant M. Wood, Intermountain Healthcare Clinical Genetics Institute, LDS Hospital, Salt Lake City, Utah, and HL7 Clinical Genomics Work Group. Physicians have been asking patients for family health history information for a long time. Clinicians use this information to stratify disease risk and to guide prevention efforts. In this era of personalized medicine, family health history information could also be used to guide genetic test ordering and interpretation. Even with advances in genetic testing technology decreasing the cost, family health history remains the best and least expensive genetic ‘test’ available. Yet, for most doctors, the process of collecting family health history information is still paper-based, interrupts clinical workflow, and typically does not get shared with other healthcare providers or family members. Physicians are asking for better, computerized tools. The HL7 Pedigree model is designed to address these issues by requiring structured and coded data, thereby making advanced clinical decision support and data integration between systems possible. This session provides a basic understanding of what data is involved, and the clinical importance of collecting robust pedigrees. Current HL7 based projects – a Microsoft Healthvault-enabled application by Intermountain Healthcare, and the online tool by the Surgeon General – are reviewed.