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The Affordable Care Act is causing a sea change in the healthcare industry
Five Healthcare Trends that will Impact Senior Living
The Affordable Care Act is causing a sea change in the healthcare industry at large, and several emerging trends are expected to impact the long-term care industry as well, including a movement toward in-home services.
Five trends in particular are worth noting, Senator Bill Frist, the keynote speaker for the National Investment Center for the Seniors Housing & Care Industry’s upcoming regional conference, told NIC in an exclusive interview.
“There is a definite rise in government sponsored healthcare,” Frist told NIC ahead of his speech he’ll give during a networking lunch at the regional conference this month on how the healthcare industry has transformed. “The implication for companies working in senior living is that they will be forced to comply with the government regulations that come with the government money.
” One aspect of the ACA that’s expected to impact the healthcare industry is the move toward value-based healthcare. This will lead to restructuring payment models, bundling care, and requirement outcomes evaluation, Frist said.
“Specifically, accountability for outcomes and a correlation with the cost of care will be a massive cultural change in medicine,” he said.
As healthcare systems develop data systems and analytics to identify patients at risk for hospital readmission in an effort to cut down on unnecessary rehospitalizations, the assisted living industry will also have to pay more attention to this data, Frist said.
There’s also a rise in the “patient-consumer”—a shift away from what Frist called the paternalism of medicine to a model that empowers patients and allows them to shop around. “The rise of consumerism imparts a need for branding in healthcare that we have not before seen,” he said.
For more information on metabolic validation for your Senior Community, contact:
PGx Medical
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
405-509-5112
info@pgxmed.com
www.pgxmed.com
Making Informed Decisions For Your Patients
Validation
Who doesn’t want validation for the work they are doing? As a healthcare professional it is important to know that the medications you are prescribing your patients are working. If not, you begin the “trial & error” process. But by giving a patient a drug that doesn’t metabolize in their system, it could cause adverse reactions or just not metabolize so the patient never improves.
If you’re not 100% sure your patients are taking medications that are working, how can you make an informed decision?
Health care professionals go to work every day wanting to provide the highest quality, safest, most appropriate care for their patients. The bottom line is that patients should not go to a hospital or other health care setting with a fear that their health will not improve. Unfortunately, in the past there was no way of knowing for sure that a drug wasn’t working. A patient may try multiple drugs before they found one that worked. That isn’t the case any longer.
At PGx, we recognized a need for personalized medicine and we also understand that we are just touching the surface of what is yet to come.
Making More Informed Treatment Decisions for Your Patients
Not all patients respond appropriately to a standard, One Size Fits All dose. Pharmacogenetic testing provides a lifetime of protection against drug toxicity or lack of drug efficacy. This simple test will help you determine a patient’s drug sensitivity allowing you to provide better care.
Implementing the Program
The PGx Metabolic Validation Program allows a healthcare professional to gain insightful information via a simple buccal swab. The swab is then analyzed at the laboratory and a report is sent directly to the medical facility to be utilized when treating the patient. This once in a lifetime test will help physicians make informed decisions when treating patients to: reduce side effects, increase clinical response and gives health care physicians collaborative access to pinpoint appropriate medications for specific diagnoses.
We’ve made it easy to incorporate pharmacogenetics into your clinic, company, pharmacy or center. The ultimate goal for PGx Medical is to help you provide better healthcare and improve quality of life for your patients or residents.
If it costs your facility nothing, can yield life changing benefits, makes staff and consulting jobs easier and can be completed in less than a day, what is the downside and why would you not want this tool for your patients?
For more information on how you can implement this no cost program into your facility, email: info@pgxmed.com, call 405-509-5112 or go to www.pgxmed.com.
How doctors can help treat patients with pharmacogenetics
In what ways can a doctor use pharmacogenetics to help treat their patients?
Pharmacogenetics can be used by doctors to identify the optimal dose and/or medicine for each patient.
The right dose
Dosage is usually based on factors such as age, weight, and liver and kidney function. But for someone who breaks down a drug quickly, a typical dose may be ineffective. In contrast, someone who breaks down a drug more slowly may need a lower dose to avoid accumulating toxic levels of the drug in the bloodstream. A pharmacogenetic test can help reveal the right dose for individual patients.
The right drug—for depression
Depression can be treated with a variety of different medicines, and it is often time-consuming and difficult to find the drug(s) that works best for each person. In the future, genetic testing may take some of the guesswork out of choosing a drug regimen. These tests are likely to involve analyzing a person’s liver enzymes, especially those in the cytochrome P450 family, which are largely responsible for processing antidepressants.
The right drug—for cardiovascular disease
Statins, the most widely prescribed drugs worldwide, help prevent cardiovascular disease by reducing the level of “bad” cholesterol in the bloodstream. While statins work well for many patients, responses are highly variable and doctors must adjust the dosage for each person.
Researchers have discovered that variants in a number of molecules—including those that break down or transport statins, as well as the statins’ molecular target in the cholesterol production pathway—contribute to the variable response among individuals. Using results of genetic tests, doctors may one day be able to prescribe the right dose from the start and more quickly reduce their patients’ risk of dangerous cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke.
For more information on pharmacogenetic testing, contact:
PGx Medical
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
405-509-5112
info@pgxmed.com
Source: www.nigms.nih.gov
The Pharmacist Role in Pharmacogenetics
As drug therapy experts, pharmacists are in a unique position to push the frontiers of pharmacogenetics in both the research and clinical practice environments.
Pharmacists are the logical information nexus to bring together information on patient health, medications being taken or considered, and potential genetic interaction with those medications.
In an attempt to avoid the adverse effects of drugs, or to ensure their efficacy, there is a growing capacity to connect individual differences in biochemistry causing these differences directly with personal genetic variations. More than 100 drugs now carry FDA pharmacogenetic information on the label, and this labeling trend will certainly grow. The application of such knowledge can be critical to a patient’s health, an application that requires testing and interpretation relative to medication. Pharmacogenetics may soon become common in pharmacy practice.
Community pharmacists are integral to patient care through MTM. Because of the relationships they have with patients, pharmacists are poised to assume the role of obtaining samples and providing clinical pharmacy services in response to pharmacogenetic test results. In fact, it is a natural extension of the MTM rubric for pharmacists to include the results of pharmacogenetic tests or the recommendation to test. ~pharmacist.com~
The field of pharmacogenetics presents a wide range of opportunities for pharmacists. Specific roles for pharmacists are likely to fall within three major domains: developing research methodologies and setting research directions, establishing the value of pharmacogenetic testing in clinical practice, and participating in education and infrastructure development that moves pharmacogenetic technologies toward implementation. ~JAPhA.com~
For more information on Pharmacogenetic Testing, contact:
PGx Medical
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
405-509-5112
info@pgxmed.com
Pharmacogenetics: Q & A
Your genes tell your story. How tall you are and even how you look. They also play a key role in how your body responds to medicines.
The terms pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics are often used interchangeably to describe a field of research focused on how genes affect individual responses to medicines. Whether a medicine works well for you—or whether it causes serious side effects—depends, to a certain extent, on your genes.
Q: Why is a pharmacogenetic test done?
A: A pharmacogenetic test can be done before or after medicine has been prescribed. It can help predict how a patient will metabolize a drug, allowing the physician to adjust dosages to get maximum efficacy from a drug with minimum side effects.
Q: Are the results of pharmacogenetic tests confidential?
A: While pharmacogenetic tests are designed to help people, some fear that the results could be used against them, such as to discriminate against them in a job setting or to deny them health insurance coverage. A person’s genetic information is protected through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which was passed by Congress in 1996. Many states also have laws in place that protect the privacy of health information, including genetic data.
Q: How will pharmacogenetics affect the quality of health care?
A: In the future, pharmacogenomics will increasingly enable doctors to prescribe the right dose of the right medicine the first time for everyone. This would mean that patients will receive medicines that are safer and more effective, leading to better health care overall.
Also, if scientists could identify the genetic basis for certain toxic side effects, drugs could be prescribed only to those who are not genetically at risk for these effects. This could maintain the availability of potentially lifesaving medications that might otherwise be taken off the market.
Q How do I get a pharmacogentic test?
A: On a doctors order. Once your doctor orders the test, a simple swab is taken from the inside of your mouth and sent to a laboratory. Results are sent back to your doctor to help identify the optimal dose and/or medicine for each patient.
*Source: National Institute of General Medicine Science
For more information on pharmacogenetic testing, contact:
PGx Medical
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
405-509-5112
info@pgxmed.com
www.pgxmed.com
Genotype: Why is it important?
Why should I know my patients’ genotype?
Many people have a gene variant that affects the function of one or more drug metabolizing enzymes. The altered enzyme function can change the rate of drug metabolism. Patients with gene variants are more likely to experience drug toxicity or lack of efficacy.
Most variants cause a loss of enzyme function. Patients who have these variants are poor or intermediate metabolizers. A few people have variants that increase enzyme function. These patients are ultra-rapid metabolizers.
Patients on multiple drugs are at the highest risk for adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Taking multiple medications increases the likelihood that one or more will not be metabolized correctly.
A simple genetic test helps you avoid adverse drug reactions and provide your patient a better quality of life.
For more information on how you can offer your patients/residents a better quality of life with no cost to the facility or patient, and lower healthcare costs, contact:
PGx Medical
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
405-509-5112
info@pgxmed.com