NEW YORK – Myriad Genetics on Thursday said that through a partnership with Epic Systems doctors will be able to order its genetic tests and view patients' results directly within the electronic medical records platform hosted by the software company.
The integration, slated to go live later this year, "creates a seamless, end-to-end workflow solution for healthcare providers to order Myriad tests and review results directly within their everyday Epic platform without additional steps or manual ordering processes," Myriad said in a statement announcing the partnership.
Epic's EMR platform is used by 600,000 physicians to manage the records of 250 million patients. Healthcare providers have long expressed frustration with how difficult it is to access genomic test results within EMRs. Because the reports tend to exist as PDFs and not as discrete fields within the EMR, healthcare institutions cannot easily analyze patients' outcomes based on their genetic test results or build decision support to help doctors identify when patients need testing. However, a few years ago, Epic introduced a genomics module with the goal of allowing healthcare providers to integrate genetic test results directly into the EMR.
At the same time, Epic has been inking partnerships with genetic testing labs like Myriad. For example, last year Epic announced a similar arrangement to make results from Foundation Medicine's comprehensive genomic profiling tests accessible through its EMR platform.
Salt Lake City-based Myriad, meanwhile, is in the midst of a strategic shift to focus its testing business on key indications such as cancer, pharmacogenomics, and prenatal testing, and make it easier for doctors to order tests and receive results through online interfaces. Earlier this year the company launched an integrated offering with Intermountain Healthcare, called Precise Oncology Solutions, through which doctors can order germline cancer risk assessments, companion tests, and somatic tumor profiling with a single order and receive tests via a unified online portal.