Frank Otto for Penn Medicine News: “‘Genetic counselors order testing on multiple patients every day,’ said the study’s lead author, Katherine Nathanson, MD, the Pearl Basser Professor of BRCA-Related Research and Deputy Director of the Abramson Cancer Center at Penn. ‘So if you order tests on three patients per day and return results on three patients per day – which is a very reasonable estimate– that means you save 45 minutes per day, based on what we saw. That is a big deal.’
“The average time it took a clinician to order a test for a person’s genomic information – data gleaned from personal DNA – through the new process developed by the Penn researchers was two minutes. When clinicians had to go outside of the EHR, test ordering averaged eight minutes, with the longest time being 20 minutes, a 75 percent time savings.”