To prepare for this assignment, consider the following scenario:
You are a nurse geneticist who is working for a teaching and research hospital. Your position is to promote the provider use of genetic testing for a specific drug trial. While most physicians are eager to participate in the research, a provider who primarily treats patients with HIV is reluctant to use the trial on their patients and feels utilizing the database system is a violation of HIPAA.
As a nurse leader, describe the recommendation you might make to this provider and explain why.
Post a response that addresses how precision medicine might affect genetic testing in general and the research trial described in the scenario specifically. Be specific. Your post should include your approach for facilitating the reluctant physician’s use of the trial drug and reporting the needed data. Justify your role as the nurse informaticist as it pertains to the genetics trial drug use and reporting described in the scenario.
Precision Medicine and Genetic Testing
Understanding how people’s genes affect how their bodies respond to drugs can help nurses to customize care for their patients, Precision medicine allows healthcare providers to group patients into sub-populations based on their varied susceptibility to particular diseases or responses to specific drugs (Ginsburg & Phillips, 2018). HIV is one of those diseases that have a genetic component. Precision medicine might affect genetic testing in that it can help healthcare providers to categorize patients based on how their genetic make-up influence a person’s a drug’s pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (Ginsburg & Phillips, 2018). In the given scenario, it is important to use genetic testing for the drug trial in order to determine how variations in patients’ genes affect how their bodies will respond to the test drug.
The use of genetic testing for specific drugs, also called pharmacogenomics, is highly recommended for patients with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The reason is that it is important to understand how changes in the genes of HIV patients affect drug response including the drug’s efficacy, side effects, the most appropriate dose that will produce the desired therapeutic effect, and the optimum duration required (De Almeida & Cardoso, 2022; Mayo Clinic, 2022). It is important to note that healthcare database systems are usually protected from unauthorized access. Patients’ data are usually stored in HIPAA-compliant databases that allow healthcare providers to create an environment where patients’ electronic information related to precision medicine and other health data are safely kept (McGrath et al., 2021). In studies that involve genetics trial drug use and reporting such as the one described in the scenario, the role of the nurse informaticist is to gather and categorize drug-gene results for every patient into datasets (Rahma et al., 2021). This data is then stored in a HIPAA-compliant database system where authorized providers and researchers can access it for use in decision-making regarding treatment using the tested drug.
References
De Almeida, V. C., & Cardoso, C. C. (2022). Pharmacogenetics of HIV therapy: challenges for tailoring treatment in genetically complex populations. Pharmacogenomics, 23(3), 157–159. https://doi.org/10.2217/pgs-2021-0155.
Ginsburg, G. S., & Phillips, K. A. (2018). Precision Medicine: From Science To Value. Health affairs (Project Hope), 37(5), 694–701. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.1624.
Mayo Clinic. (2022). Precision medicine and pharmacogenomics. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-health/in-depth/personalized-medicine/art-20044300
McGrath, S. P., Peabody, A. E., Jr, Walton, D., & Walton, N. (2021). Legal Challenges in Precision Medicine: What Duties Arising From Genetic and Genomic Testing Does a Physician Owe to Patients?. Frontiers in Medicine, 8, 663014. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2021.663014
Rahma, A. T., Elbarazi, I., Ali, B. R., Patrinos, G. P., Ahmed, L. A., Elsheik, M., & Al-Maskari, F. (2021). Development of the pharmacogenomics and genomics literacy framework for pharmacists. Human Genomics, 15(1), 62. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40246-021-00361-0