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Cardiology |
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| 15 Oct 2009 | Viewed: 35 | |
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As part of the $5 billion in
grants announced by President Obama, the National Institutes of Health
has granted Kaiser Permanente more than $54 million over two years
through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to conduct health
research on a multitude of critical public and clinical health areas.
The bulk of this research will utilize and leverage Kaiser Permanente's
electronic health records, the world's largest civilian electronic
health record database.
"Kaiser Permanente is proud to be part of what President Obama
called the 'single largest boost to biomedical research in history.'
It's our mission to find answers to medicine's complex questions so
that everyone can have better care," said Raymond J. Baxter, Ph.D.,
senior vice president, Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit, Research
and Health Policy. "Health research is foundational to reforming the
way we deliver care. Such evidence-based innovation is core to Kaiser
Permanente's commitment to improving care delivery and enhancing
quality outcomes, two fundamental goals of the current health care
reform debate."
The NIH has awarded 22 grants to Kaiser Permanente researchers
in various regional centers, including a $25 million Grand
Opportunities (GO) grant to conduct genotyping on 100,000 Kaiser
Permanente members participating in the Research Program on Genes,
Environment and Health, the largest population-based bio-bank in the
United States. The RPGEH is based at the Kaiser Permanente Division of
Research in Oakland, Calif.
This genetic information will be linked to data on
participants from RPGEH health surveys, disease registries and Kaiser
Permanente's vast electronic health record database, resulting in a
resource that will allow researchers to examine genetic and
environmental influences on a wide variety of health conditions. The
genotyping accomplished in collaboration with the University of
California, San Francisco will roughly double the number of individuals
in the United States available to researchers for genome-wide
association studies.
A separate NIH GO grant of nearly $4 million was awarded to
the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., to
study personalized medicine and genomic tests for colon cancer.
Researchers will use the grant money to evaluate two tests, one that
determines whether colon cancer patients will respond to a commonly
prescribed drug and another that tests for a genetic mutation that
dramatically increases the chance of developing colon cancer.
Also awarded was a $7.2 million GO grant to develop a
cardiovascular surveillance system for the Cardiovascular Research
Network (a collaborative of 14 different health plans across the U.S.
with approximately 11 million health maintenance organization members)
and $3.3 million GO grant to create a National Research Database that
will organize and leverage Kaiser Permanente's electronic health
records.
Other NIH grants include research and the building of resources aimed at better understanding the causes and treatment of autism, autoimmune disease, breast cancer, chronic diseases, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, obesity,
and successful aging; improving treatment for HIV-infected patients;
better understanding the medical care burden of cancer; and improving
post-acute care and rehabilitation for stroke
patients. Other grants also will be used to study how to use natural
language processing to more accurately extract data from the electronic
medical record.
"We have a unique opportunity in front of us right now to
transform and reform the way we deliver health care in this country,"
said John H. Cochran, MD, executive director of The Permanente
Federation. "Kaiser Permanente believes that through evidence-based
research and health information technology we can change how
personalized health care is delivered."
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| News Source: medical news today |
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