Erica Ramos is the director and head of clinical and product development at Geisinger, an innovative health service organization covering about 1.5 million patients throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and encompassing 13 hospital campuses, two research centers, and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.

Ramos joins the podcast to discuss the MyCode program, a research effort that began as a Geisinger biobank in 2007 and has since become a collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to perform whole exome sequencing on the samples collected.

They very quickly realized the potential impact of the genomic information they were gathering—information with immediate medical relevancy, such as that related to hereditary breast cancer, hereditary colon cancer, irregular heart conditions, and familial high cholesterol. As a result, the MyCode protocol was changed in 2015 to include a return of results to patient participants for a defined set of conditions.

Of the 92,000 samples they’ve sequenced, the team at MyCode has returned about 1,050 results to participants. Today, they are looking at how people respond to the information they receive, how the information is delivered, how chatbots could be used in the delivery of results to patients, and how to make genetics and genomics more accessible by primary care physicians.

To hear the full conversation and learn what’s on the horizon, tune in and visit geisinger.org/precision-health/mycode.

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