GenXys Healthcare Systems™ supports Precision Medicine through partnership with Microsoft Azure™

27 Feb GenXys Healthcare Systems™ supports Precision Medicine through partnership with Microsoft Azure™

Offering safety, security and peace of mind for advanced healthcare teams and their molecular labs

GenXys provides the world’s most comprehensive precision prescribing solutions with embedded pharmacogenetics to solve one of healthcare’s biggest challenges: inappropriate (“trial-and-error”) prescribing. Adverse drug reactions are a top five cause of death in North America. Part of the reason that the GenXys Clinical Decision Support platform has been so effective is through the integration of Microsoft’s Azure IaaS (infrastructure as a service). Azure’s cloud environment is an enabler of health systems and their molecular labs of the future: the GenXys platform can support many thousands of clinicians around the world with country-specific patient and genetic database environments supporting local privacy, security, and storage rules. It also removes the limitations associated with on-premises hardware including degrading performance, application code base changes, and capability updates.

“GenXys assessed a number of options, some very impressive, to support our data, infrastructure, and performance management needs,” says Scot Fraser, Software Engineering Manager at GenXys. “We settled on Microsoft’s Azure environment because it supported being able to centrally host our applications and database models along with dynamic performance scalability. In addition, country-specific Azure environments meet the regulatory requirements for privacy, security, and storage of genetic data in the countries that GenXys seeks to operate in.”

Trust Implied

Azure’s cloud solution utilizes industry best practices, including disaster recovery, as the backbone for the security and compliance they offer for all data management and services. Most notably, Azure is certified by HITRUST. HITRUST created and maintains the Common Security Framework (CSF), a certifiable framework to help healthcare organizations and their providers with their security and compliance in a consistent and streamlined manner. “Because of the sensitive nature of patient data, it is important to make sure that data storage is beyond reproach,” Fraser confirms. “Azure is a model for best practices, is widely trusted, and is a secure environment for the GenXys application and associated data.”

In addition to cloud security, Azure supports its clients through replicated physical servers if needed so there is never any downtime. This support is just another level of due diligence.

A Perfect Fit

GenXys’ category-defining solutions are licensed and accessed via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. As mentioned by Amy Berk, Director of Population Health US Health & Public Sector​ at Microsoft, in a recent webinar hosted by GenXys in conjunction with Agena Bioscience, “Population health serves as a framework for providers and payers today. It accelerates towards value-based care, which is a conversation I have with a lot of my customers; those discussions are all grounded in cloud technologies in that Microsoft cloud for healthcare is enabling better experiences, insight, and care”. Earlier this year GenXys transitioned several of its solutions, which utilize PGx and other health data points, to utilize Azure’s PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings to enhance security, performance and offer dynamic scalability. This allowed us to maintain throughput dynamically when customer demand was high but not incur additional costs when demand lowered. The architecture required to perform auto-scaling in-house would have been significant but was easily accessible via Azure with a few mouse clicks.

“We’re incredibly happy with our systems architecture aligning with Microsoft’s Azure platform,” says Karl Pringle, CEO of GenXys. “It’s flexible enough to meet our customer’s needs now, and robust enough to meet our rapidly growing customer base in the markets we serve. Our customers expect the best in capability, performance, and security”

in: https://www.genxys.com/webinar-translating-pgx-data-infrastructure

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GenXys, with a presence across North America, provides the world’s most comprehensive precision prescribing solutions with embedded pharmacogenetics to solve one of healthcare’s biggest challenges: inappropriate (“trial-and-error”) prescribing. GenXys’ clinical decision support software suite is in use by major insurance providers, health systems, pharmacies and their pharmacogenetic labs across North America. Ongoing global clinical studies are paving the way into geographical markets to enable GenXys to realize its vision of making every prescription better with its software to increase patient safety, improve population health, and reduce healthcare costs. https://www.genxys.com/

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John, a 47-year-old male in pretty good shape, used an in-pharmacy self-serve blood pressure machine which indicated that he had high blood pressure. He then opted to have a point of care cholesterol test. Within minutes John was prescribed a statin, the class of medication routinely used to lower high cholesterol. Within a few weeks John was suffering significantly from joint aches and muscle fatigue, a known side effects of statins that affect some people. His pharmacist recommended that it might be a genetic based side effect and that a test to confirm this hypothesis and to be used to identify a more appropriate statin would be beneficial.

Within days, his pharmacist was able to determine with guidance from powerful software that had analyzed his genetics, his other medications, and his kidney function that there was a better statin for him. This information was shared electronically with John’s doctor who was also able to access the same software with the same data points. He was able to add in another piece of Johns health data. Simultaneously, some new regulatory treatment guidelines which had come into force, were updated in the software algorithms. The evidence-based guidance was that there was only one statin that was safe and effective for John. John now lives a life with a reduced risk of high cholesterol and does so without aches or muscle fatigue.

This story is not the fanciful fiction of the future. It is the reality of what is now available. The class of software is called Clinical Decision Support Software. With the advent of cloud Infrastructure as a Service environments like Azure, the GenXys platform is able to be performant, scalable, and secure with 24×7 accessibility.