IT Can Help Deliver A Healthy Baby
Michael VizardEdited by Sarah Varney
July 19, 2009
Everybody knows that family history plays a significant role in determining our overall health, but nobody is exactly sure to what degree.
The National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics is working with the March of Dimes, the Genetic Alliance and the Newton Wellesley Hospital of Partners Healthcare to create a new online service that doctors can use to analyze a woman’s family history data to determine what problems might arise during a pregnancy.
The project, which will take three years to develop is funded by a $1.2 million grant from the Genetics Branch of the Health Resources and Services
Administration, will ask pregnant women to fill out family history questionnaires using a tablet PC. That information will be analyzed to determine whether the pregnant woman should be referred to a specialist early on in order to better facilitate her pregnancy.
According to Bruce Lin, Manager for Public Health Initiative at the March of Dimes and Project Director for the non-profit organization on this effort, the information collected will be integrated with other electronic health records that will be securely stored on a distributed network of systems. The project participants plan to develop tools for distributing the trending information collected by the service to aid doctors in providing care to pregnant women.
Down the road, it’s conceivable that the project will be extended to apply pattern recognition software to help identify specific trends from all the data collected.
Lin stresses that every effort will be made to secure the privacy of the participants in the program and that information collected about any one individual will only be made available to authorized medical personnel that have access to a closed system.
This project is the latest in a series of healthcare initiatives aimed at determining the role of family history in healthcare conditions. One caveat is that people should only take this information under advisement and not use it as a sole determining factor when deciding important family issues. But at the end of the day, the more that is known about susceptibility to certain healthcare conditions, the more that can be done early on to mitigate potential problems.
Please read our legal disclaimer.
Write a comment
- Required fields are marked with *.
Bookmark with:
What are these?