By Clinical Informatics News Staff

June 6, 2014 | Geisinger Health Systems, one of the country's largest provider networks, yesterday announced the construction of a new facility in Forty Fort, PA, to provide patients with remote consultations around DNA diagnostics. Geisinger has made a recent push to incorporate genetics more aggressively into its services, hiring Michael Murray and Monica Giovanni from Harvard Medical School to spearhead its Genomic Medicine Institute, and announcing plans to sequence 100,000 patients' whole exomes. The new Geisinger Genomic Medicine Center will, according to Geisinger, be the first in the nation to offer a "telegenomics" service, connecting physicians and other professionals to patients through the web to deliver diagnoses and counseling remotely. The opening is scheduled for this November.

The new center, which Geisinger expects to cost just over half a million dollars, will be located next to a pediatric center in the same network, which is likely to be a major source of referrals given modern DNA diagnostics' focus on rare pediatric disease. However, the center expects to field referrals from a range of care centers, and Geisinger hopes to expand into common chronic disease risks as projects like its own sequencing initiative help to unravel the genetic basis of health.