This article has been edited to clarify that a steering committee, not the coordinating center, will select projects.
NEW YORK – The National Institutes of Health said Monday that it awarded $27 million over five years to establish a national network aimed at integrating genomics into learning health systems, including $5.4 million in funding for the first year.
A learning health system is a health system in which internal data and experience are systematically integrated with external evidence and then put into practice.
The Genomics-enabled Learning Health System (gLHS) Network will identify and advance these approaches, with the overarching goal of creating generalizable knowledge and genomic medicine practices to improve patient care. The network will receive its funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The gLHS consists of six clinical study sites, each of which will propose a project that uses patient data to develop and refine some aspect of genomic medicine, which could include implementing testing for hereditary diseases or selecting appropriate therapies for patients based on genomic information, the NIH said in a statement.
Furthermore, a coordinating center will orchestrate how the network's tools and resources are shared with the broader scientific and clinical communities and a steering committee will select a set of projects based on their feasibility with the program's five-year time frame and which have the potential to be shared throughout the network.
The six clinical sites are Boston Veterans Administration Research Institute, Geisinger Health System, Indiana University School of Medicine, Northwestern Medicine Feinberg School of Medicine, University of Utah Health, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Vanderbilt University Medical Center will serve as the the coordinating center for the program.
"As genomic testing becomes increasingly common, more and more genomic data are available in clinical settings, and learning health systems present an opportunity to translate this evidence quickly and directly into improvements in medical care," the NIH said.
"Learning health systems present an excellent opportunity to generate new medical understandings from genomic data, which is critical to realizing the promise of precision health for everyone," Robb Rowley, program director in the Division of Genomic Medicine at the NHGRI, said in a statement.
"Currently, the success of learning health systems is typically limited to highly resourced medical centers," added Teri Manolio, director of NHGRI’s Division of Genomic Medicine. "We hope this initiative will provide generalizable tools that enable limited-resource settings to learn from their ongoing experiences to improve their implementation of genomic medicine."