Solving the problem for delivery of Precision Medicine

Over the past few years, we have all watched the cost of running complex DNA based testing drop dramatically. So much so, that the average consumer can now have insights into their own DNA for around $100. Industry leaders believe the price will likely keep dropping and more people will want access to information about their own DNA.  It is also inevitable that companies will keep raising money to drop the cost of testing down to almost nothing, hoping that there is value in the data. 

Here at ixLayer, we feel the real value is in the experience that you create around the delivery of this information and how you apply that information to someone’s life. The value will not lie in the test itself, rather the value will be the “user manual” that a person or physician uses to guide treatment and health management based on these results. 

With the launch of the clinical platform today we are providing infrastructure to enable the delivery of complex testing and results to patients in any environment. The precision health care platform is the culmination of two years spent working closely with health systems, clinical laboratories, physicians, and patients.

While we got our start in building direct to consumer experiences, we are now working on simplifying the process of distribution and delivery of genomic information for physicians, for health systems, for labs, and for pharmaceutical companies.

Solving the problem for delivery of precision medicine

We are striving to be the integral “layer” of technology that brings together all of the components that help our industry deliver on the promise of precision and personalized medicine. We are powering large scale programs within health systems that want to offer genetic testing to members and thinking through how to make sure these test results are acted upon. Through our partnership with the Innovation Institute, we are making results of genetic testing ordered on the platform available in the electronic health record and including their own physicians in the process.

The core components of our platform can be useful in many scenarios where patient engagement is key to the success of a program. For example, we recently partnered with a lab that is enrolling patients in a multicenter study. This lab is tasked with finding physician groups to participate, educating them on the testing process, gathering consent from patients, and a whole host of other tasks that lead to this being a very complex workflow.

We created a dashboard where the lab can see all of their sites in one glance, see the number of patients tested, and look at clinical data from each site. We also provided the individual sites with access to their own dashboard as well. These physicians can now automatically enroll patients into a study, collect consent online, collect clinical information online, have the testing done at the patient’s home, and upload any future results directly into the dashboard. Patients in this study appreciate the transparency around results and participation, and physicians appreciate having more time in their day to focus on other tasks. 

The digital healthcare solutions platform can be re-skinned to address multiple use cases, but the main goal remains the same. Create a user-friendly experience, broaden access to genomic-based precision and personalized medicine, and continually engage users.  

Unlocking the value of genotype and phenotype health data:

While the goal of the platform is to create experiences that users appreciate, we also know that there is tremendous value in looking at the data that is collected by the platform. We are getting really valuable phenotypic data during the intake process on the platform. This data might be input by a physician or the patient themselves and includes info like age, family history, previous testing, where they live, what medicines someone takes, etc.

Through our patented health data-graph, we can then pair that with the result data that is uploaded into our platform either manually or through our automated lab integrations. We can then create cohorts of individuals within our system and tag users with unique identifiers. This allows us to send future follow up to specific cohorts and surveys to collect additional information. When developing this feature, we were thinking about how we could assist with identifying and finding rare disease patients as well as recruitment for studies.

The health data-graph can provide de-identified information back to pharmaceutical partners looking for study participants, help a health system better understand their members, and help labs more quickly establish the clinical utility of their tests. By taking the tools we use to engage patients with direct to consumer testing, we have realized that we can speed up some pretty important processes within our industry. All of this is happening in a HIPAA cloud environment, with data security and privacy being at the center of everything we do here. 

Where do we go from here?

We are still in the early days of realizing how precision medicine and the complex tests associated will really impact patient lives on a large scale. We are hopeful that the tools being built here at ixLayer will help patients get access to diagnostic health solutions and ultimately the treatments they need as quickly as possible. Our focus will be on continuing to work with physicians and patients to better understand how our precision care software can be leveraged to improve outcomes.