Kaiser Permanente announced that it has secured about $54 million in NIH grants for an electronic health record data mining project and other medical research initiatives, the San Francisco Business Times reports (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 10/12).
The federal economic stimulus package provided the funding for the 22 grants (DerGurahian, Modern Healthcare, 10/12).
EHR Data Mining Project
The largest of the grants allocates $24.8 million for a project designed to examine how genes and the environment influence disease, health and longevity.
For the project, Kaiser will work with the University of California-San Francisco to genotype 100,000 Kaiser members in Northern California. Researchers then will link the genetic information with EHR data and health survey findings.
The researchers also will examine the influence of environmental factors such as air and water quality, access to healthy food and proximity to recreation space.
Officials say the project could help researchers identify genetic factors that cause different medication responses (Mosquera, Government Health IT, 10/12).
In addition, the project could double the number of U.S. residents available for genome-wide association studies, according to the researchers.
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