ONC declares Five pilot sites that have been opted for Sync for Genes program

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has declared five pilot sites that have been chosen for their engagement with different facets of genomic data as part of the recently launched ONC-funded Sync for Genes program designed to assist bring clinical genomics to the point of care.

The five Sync for Genes pilot agencies and their respective focuses are:

• Counsyl with Intermountain Healthcare (Family Health History Genetics)

• The Food and Drug Administration (Sequencing Quality and Regulatory Genomics)

• Foundation Medicine with Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Somatic/Tumor Testing)

• Illumina (Next Generation Sequencing Solutions)

• The National Marrow Donor Program/Be The Match (Tissue Matching)

Gil Alterovitz, who leads the Sync for Genes effort and is a professor at the institute of Harvard Medical School’s Computational Health Informatics Program/Boston Children’s Hospital, claims each of the five pilot sites represent distinct use cases in precision medicine.

“We have made incredible development just in the last few months,” adds Alterovitz. “It is actually wonderful to be capable to move forward and gather these precious insights from real-life settings. As ONC’s Jon White has called the pilot groups, these are the ‘real heavyweights’ in this field.”

“Feedback from the five pilot sites will be utilized by Sync for Genes to ensure the development of open source validation scripts and implementation guidance documents to support requirements in the field of genomics for others to utilize,” states an April 11 ONC blog.

Previously this year, ONC inaugurated Sync for Genes in partnership with the National Institutes of Health to support NIH’s Precision Medicine Initiative. Specifically, S4Genes is supporting the PMI national cohort of 1 million or more Americans—the All of Us research program—who will contribute their physical, genomic, and electronic health record-based clinical information to the landmark study.

For its part, Sync4Genes is meant to make better the genomic information sharing—involving information from next generation sequencing (NGS) laboratories—in a consistent and usable way through point-of-care applications as well as “create a foundation for widespread use of genomic information to be shared in the All of Us research program and future studies,” in accordance to ONC.

“Sync for Genes is our 1st step towards integrating clinical genomics and clinical genomics testing into the point of care by expediting the utilization of standards like HL7’s (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources),” claims Acting National Coordinator Jon White, MD. “It is meant to enable and improve patients’ capabilities to seamlessly share their genomic information…we are going to take those standards that we have been working on and we are going to be pilot testing them.”