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Surescripts
Surescripts’ Medication History and National Record Locator Service to Help Enrollees of the Research Cohort Contribute Data Electronically
ARLINGTON, Va. – February 25, 2016 – Today Surescripts, the nation’s leading health information network, announces its support of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). Surescripts will participate in the White House Precision Medicine Initiative Summit and pledge its support to provide Surescripts’ infrastructure and technology to help the Precision Medicine Initiative aggregate the medical records of the more than one million expected patient volunteers in the National Institutes of Health’s national research cohort.
“Health technology is the foundation for success in personalized healthcare, and thus we’re pleased to support the White House Precision Medicine Initiative in our common mission to get the right information to the right place at the right time to improve patient care,” said Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officers of Surescripts. “With Surescripts’ unmatched network connectivity, we safely and securely facilitate that critical flow of patient information, ensuring that timely access is possible, interoperability is achievable, and personalized healthcare can become a reality.”
First unveiled at the 2015 State of the Union Address, the Precision Medicine Initiative will engineer patient-powered research to gain an understanding of which treatments and therapies work best for which patients by examining genomic, environmental and lifestyle data. As part of the President’s commitment, $130 million was designated to the National Institutes of Health for development of a voluntary national research cohort of a million or more volunteers to advance the nation’s understanding of health and disease and set the foundation for a new way of doing research through engaged participants and open, responsible data sharing.
Surescripts will leverage its Medication History and National Record Locator Service to give the enrollees of the National Institutes of Health’s national research cohort, once it is launched, the ability to contribute their most current medication information and other health information to the Precision Medicine Initiative cohort electronically, providing critical and timely personalized medical data to the study.
Surescripts National Record Locator Service is a query and response solution that leverages Surescripts network and Master Patient Index of more than 230 million patients to locate and exchange patient records. The solution will grant physicians conducting research the ability to quickly obtain patient records regardless if the users’ electronic health record systems are compatible with those in which the records are stored. In addition to enabling a full view of available health records, researchers will also have access to patient prescription information. Surescripts Medication History uses both pharmacy benefit manager claims and pharmacy fill data to provide a view of existing and past drug therapies and compliance. Together, Surescripts National Record Locator Service and Medication History solution will facilitate the electronic flow of information necessary to make the Precision Medicine Initiative successful.