GENETWORx

GENETWORx GENETWORx: Your Partner in Personalized Medicine. For patients: “One size fits all” isn’t an effective approach to health care.

GENETWORx offers a key to personalized health: drug-response genetic testing that helps patients, doctors, pharmacists, and health plan sponsors determine the right dose, of the right medication, for the best patient outcome – minimizing adverse reactions and offering patients truly personalized medicine. Pharmacogenomics - genetic testing that gives patients the information they need to make informed decisions about their health, hand-in-hand with their doctors and pharmacists and their health plans – that’s “my size fits me” health care. For healthcare providers: GENETWORx helps doctors and pharmacists use genetic drug-response testing to enhance the patient-centric care they provide. We help create a robust team approach with patients by providing clinicians - doctors and pharmacists - with advanced testing tools to assist in achieving truly personalized medicine. A patient's DNA becomes the foundation of a comprehensive plan for their optimal health. The result: highly individualized patient care that helps to increase medication adherence, and to prevent adverse drug reactions before they occur. For health plan sponsors: GENETWORx can help you provide highly individualized care to each of your plan participants. This patient-centered and cost-effective approach to treatment can prevent adverse reactions before they occur, which can reduce hospital admissions due to over- or under-medication, and also reduce costs with targeted drug dosages.

"Millennials and younger generations expect to use their own technologies and biological data to help doctors deliver mo...
01/18/2016

"Millennials and younger generations expect to use their own technologies and biological data to help doctors deliver more personal care.

Caring for a rapidly ageing population is challenging. Experts working to revitalize healthcare for the 21 century are tackling this challenge by shifting from a one-size-fits-all to a more personalized healthcare approach, one that is heavily influenced by how young people use technology.

To combat skyrocketing healthcare costs for an American population of 326 million people spanning six generations, experts are turning to bioscience and new technologies as well as to young, tech-savvy digital natives who are already nudging healthcare into the Internet age."

Millennials and younger generations expect to use their own technologies and biological data to help doctors deliver more personal care.

"Patients with a serious or life-threatening condition who are unable to enter a clinical trial and have little hope for...
01/15/2016

"Patients with a serious or life-threatening condition who are unable to enter a clinical trial and have little hope for effective therapies may, under certain circumstances, be granted access to investigational medicines under what is known as "pre-approval access" or "compassionate use."

For these patients, even the potential benefits of medications that are not yet approved or regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) may outweigh the potential risks.

A number of ethical and safety issues have been raised, including how to ensure that distribution of unapproved medications is handled systematically and fairly, that scientific research on the risks and benefits of new medicines benefits society as a whole, and that individual patients are protected from unnecessary harm."

Patients with life-threatening conditions and poor response to FDA-approved drugs may be able to receive investigational drugs under preapproval access or compassionate use -- but they have to know about them first.

"Global spending on medicine will increase roughly 30% in the next 5 years, reaching $1.4 trillion by 2020, according to...
01/14/2016

"Global spending on medicine will increase roughly 30% in the next 5 years, reaching $1.4 trillion by 2020, according to projections from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

That is up about $349 billion from 2015 spending, and almost double the increase from 2011 through 2015 ($182 billion).

The biggest drivers of spending growth are greater access to medicines, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (including cheaper drugs), and innovation in medicine, according to the report, "Global Medicines Use in 2020: Outlook and Implications."

Greater access to medicines, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and innovation in medicine are the top drivers of spending growth.

"Medications are becoming more expensive for the sickest people, but at the same time, they’ve never been more affordabl...
01/13/2016

"Medications are becoming more expensive for the sickest people, but at the same time, they’ve never been more affordable for the majority of Americans.

How is that possible?

We had an expert dig into some data for us, and he found that the number of people who say they’re having trouble affording their prescriptions is at its lowest level in about 10 years."

-- Medications are becoming more expensive for the sickest people, but at the same time, they’ve never been more affordable for the majority of Americans.

01/12/2016

"Although medical science most often advances incrementally on the basis of an ever-accumulating body of evidence, occasionally leaps forward are made.

And quite often these leaps fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Today's standard of care was yesterday's experimental treatment, and before that, in many cases, it was one man or woman's visionary idea.

The history of medicine includes many examples of ideas that were initially ridiculed or rejected by the medical establishment but that later became widely adopted. "

Many well-known medical concepts and standard procedures of today were initially ridiculed or rejected by the medical community when they were first introduced.

"Any physician working in a hospital has likely noticed that many of those admitted for inpatient surgery are taking mul...
01/11/2016

"Any physician working in a hospital has likely noticed that many of those admitted for inpatient surgery are taking multiple prescription medications. This study confirms the suspicion that a greater number of patients are on more medications than ever before. For example, the authors found that almost 40% of the US population over 65 years of age is on five or more prescription medications. This percentage was established in the general population and is not specifically for patients undergoing surgery or those who are hospitalized at any moment, as such data were not available to the investigators.

The important finding of polypharmacy raises other crucial questions for policymakers and health systems, such as whether a primary physician is managing the patient's multiple medications to ensure that each is warranted and that the combination is optimal."

Dr Macario reviews a recent analysis that shows a notable uptick in prescriptions between the years 1999 and 2012, particularly among those older than 65 years of age.

Interesting Findings in Medicine:"Happiness has no direct effect on mortality, concludes a team of United Kingdom resear...
01/08/2016

Interesting Findings in Medicine:

"Happiness has no direct effect on mortality, concludes a team of United Kingdom researchers in the largest study ever conducted on the topic.

In detailed and fully adjusted analysis of data on more than 700,000 women, the team found that there was no link between happiness and the risk for death, whether from all causes, ischemic heart disease, or cancer.

Instead, they believe that a person's risk for mortality increases not because of unhappiness itself but because of the effect that unhappiness has on behavior."

Levels of happiness have no impact on an individual's mortality risk, concludes a detailed study of more than 700,000 women followed for over 10 years.

"Question: I have a question about data ownership, as we're talking about precision medicine and how data are being used...
01/07/2016

"Question: I have a question about data ownership, as we're talking about precision medicine and how data are being used to change how medicine is delivered. Some of the data are going to be monetized, and ownership becomes more important at that point. On the basis of your experiences, what do you see for the future? How do you think discussions [of ownership] will go?"

Read the link below to hear the panel's answers....

At Medscape's first Medicine 3.0 conference, Editor-in-Chief Eric Topol leads a panel discussion on how to make medicine more precise, stressing that it's not always about genomics.

"Drugs can be expensive, difficult to research, hard to get approved, and, according to a recent report, don't work on l...
01/06/2016

"Drugs can be expensive, difficult to research, hard to get approved, and, according to a recent report, don't work on large parts of the population. These factors likely put a great deal of pressure on pharmaceutical companies to research drugs that have the highest probability of turning a profit rather than those that could help the most people.

But this paradigm may be shifting with the help of IT and big data.

The industry has found new ways IT and big data are making a major impact on the way drugs are being researched by helping create more effective trials."

Researchers are poised to make huge advances in medicine, particularly in how we treat cancer and arthritis. See how big data and IT are contributing.

A Clostridium difficile infection — a challenge in any patient — can be particularly difficult in patients with inflamma...
01/05/2016

A Clostridium difficile infection — a challenge in any patient — can be particularly difficult in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Even testing for infection can be a problem, said Alan Moss, MD.

Although it is easy for infectious disease physicians to identify the typical symptoms of diarrhea associated with C difficile, "they also overlap with most of the symptoms of an IBD flare," said Dr Moss, from Harvard Medical School and the Beth Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

"About 7% of patients hospitalized for an IBD flare are found to be C diff–positive," he pointed out."

Contact us today to learn about our C. difficile testing.

C difficile can be particularly challenging in patients with inflammatory bowel disease, but recent advances in the treatment of such patients and evidence-driven solutions could help.

"Just like that, the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates voted to ban direct-to-consumer (DTC) adverti...
01/04/2016

"Just like that, the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates voted to ban direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription products and some medical devices. The original resolution, brought by the Hospital Medical Staff section only to study DTC, suddenly snowballed into a resolution to ban it.

When politics reaches a tipping point, movement can be at lightning speed. The American public and its physicians are sick of egregious drug price gouging and ubiquitous, misleading DTC ads that drive drug use and costs way up. Our AMA actually did something that the great majority of American physicians can support."

Do you agree with the ban?

The AMA vote to ban DTC advertising of prescription drugs is an important step. Will it influence Congress? Don't hold your breath, says Dr Lundberg.

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