Physician anesthesiologist appointed to working group for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative

Chicago – April 6, 2015 – Sachin Kheterpal, M.D., M.B.A., physician anesthesiologist and associate professor at the University of Michigan, has been appointed to a team of experts that will lay the groundwork for President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative formed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week.

Dr. Kheterpal joins a group of genetics and large clinical research studies experts who will gather and distill public input on the president’s initiative and its planned 1 million participants.  These participants will volunteer to share biological, genomic, clinical, environmental, lifestyle and behavioral information with qualified researchers.

“With the ever-changing landscape of medical care in the United States, the working group has no easy task,” said J.P. Abenstein, M.S.E.E., M.D., president, American Society of Anesthesiologists® (ASA®). “Dr. Kheterpal’s training as a physician anesthesiologist makes him an excellent addition to the team.”

Physician anesthesiologists serve as leaders in medicine and patient safety, as they evaluate, monitor and supervise patient care before, during and after surgery. Their extensive knowledge makes them uniquely qualified to step in during emergencies and make critical decisions to save lives. Their role extends beyond the operating room as pain medicine experts who diagnose, evaluate and treat patients who suffer from pain.

Dr. Kheterpal and the working group will help to define what can be learned from a study of this scale and scope, what issues will need to be addressed and considered, and what success would look like in the future.  They will gather input from patient and scientific stakeholder groups through public workshops on precision medicine topics, including patient privacy, electronic health records, mobile health technologies, existing research cohorts, participant preferences and inclusion of minority and underserved populations.  The working group will submit a preliminary report on its findings in September 2015.

Dr. Kheterpal leads the Multicenter Perioperative Group (www.mpogresearch.org) and the Anesthesiology Performance Improvement and Reporting Exchange (www.aspirecqi.org), a consortium of 47 medical centers around the world focused on using electronic health record data to enable perioperative medicine research and improve adherence to real-world, evidence-based standards of care.  In partnership with hundreds of physician anesthesiologists participating in these efforts, approximately 3 million detailed patient records have been aggregated, synchronized, and cleaned for outcomes research and quality-improvement efforts led by member institutions.

“Dr. Kheterpal’s work is crucial to the improvement of patient care in this country, and his contributions to the president’s initiative will be in no small form,” said Dr. Abenstein.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists
Founded in 1905, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) is an educational, research and scientific society with more than 52,000 members organized to raise and maintain the standards of the medical practice of anesthesiology. ASA is committed to ensuring physician anesthesiologists evaluate and supervise the medical care of patients before, during and after surgery to provide the highest quality and safest care every patient deserves. 

For more information on the field of anesthesiology, visit the American Society of Anesthesiologists online at asahq.org. To learn more about the role physician anesthesiologists play in ensuring patient safety, visit asahq.org/WhenSecondsCount. Join the social conversation today. Like ASA on Facebook, follow ASALifeline on Twitter.

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