ASA Member Appointed to Working Group for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative

ASA Member Sachin Kheterpal, M.D., M.B.A., was appointed to a working group for the Precision Medicine Initiative announced by President Barack Obama earlier this year.  Appointed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) National Institutes of Health, Dr. Kheterpal will be part of 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.

The working group will work 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 in the future of the study.  To do so, the working group will gather input from patient and scientific stakeholder groups through public workshops on precision medicine topics, including 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 their findings in September 2015.

Dr. Kheterpal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor.  He received his Bachelor of Science, Doctorate of Medicine, and Master in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.  He 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.

The working group includes 16 members and 3 co-chairs.  It will also include ex-officio members from the Department of Defense, Department of Veteran Affairs, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

For more information about the Precision Medicine Initiative, please visit http://www.nih.gov/precisionmedicine