In a meeting on December 15th, the
CalPERS Health Benefits Committee
approved moving forward with a pilot
program proposed by the Personalized
Healthcare Information Technology (pHIT)
Task Force convened by CCST and the
California Business, Transportation, and
Housing Agency (BTH).
The underlying purpose of the one
year pilot study is to assist the state in
recommending how the state's Business
Transportation and Housing Agency, the
Health and Human Services Agency's
Health Information Exchange (HIE)
workgroups, the Privacy and Security
Advisory Board (PSAB), and the California
Public Employees Retirement System
should develop pHIT related policies, and
to determine the potential value of pHIT
as applied to personalized healthcare.
Specifically, the pHIT Pilot Study will
seek to demonstrate how information
technology may enable the integration
of genomic information into an electronic health record system and how decisionmaking
could be improved by individuals
and their care providers by building
a new knowledge-based model for
decision support. The study will also seek
to identify ways to improve quality of an
individual's healthcare, reduce the burdens
of "disease care", reduce costs overall, and
grow California businesses. As a result
of thorough research by pHIT Task Force
leadership, breast cancer is recommended as the target disease focus for this pilot
study, as there are at least two genetic/
genomic tests currently used by
physicians as standard of care.
As part of the agreement with CalPERS,
this work would include the retrieval of
retrospective, de-identified data from the
Health Care Decision Support System.
The pHIT Task Force (chaired by Dr.
Ramesh Rao, California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information
Technology, UCSD) is charged to propose
HIT infrastructure goals for the state in
support of personalized health. It was first
convened in March 2009.
In addition to CCST and BTH, pHIT Pilot
Study partners include:
- Anthem/Well Point, Inc.
- CentriHealth
- Genomic Health
- Myriad Genetic Laboratories, Inc.
- CalPERS
