P4 Medicine institute, PeaceHealth Launch Partnership to Pilot New Model in Health Care

Innovation consortium hopes to use breakthroughs in genome mapping and molecular diagnostics to predict and prevent disease and maintain wellness

SEATTLE, March 15, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- PeaceHealth and the P4 Medicine institute (P4Mi) announced a partnership today that will ultimately give PeaceHealth providers additional innovative care tools and technologies to predict and potentially delay and / or avoid disease in patients through breakthroughs in genome mapping and molecular diagnostics.  

The P4 Medicine institute selected PeaceHealth, a regional healthcare system serving rural, suburban and urban communities in Alaska, Washington and Oregon, as its founding community health partner.

"This is where innovation and cutting-edge science truly joins the mainstream in service to improving the health of individuals and communities," said Peter Adler, PeaceHealth's Senior Vice President for Strategy, Innovation and Development. "Over time, we hope to take rapidly emerging P4Mi health and wellness innovations and integrate them into everyday interactions between PeaceHealth providers and their patients to better predict, prevent and treat disease. As the founding community member of the P4 Medicine institute, we will have an opportunity to better engage both patients and their caregivers in making personal choices that will make a difference in one's future health status and outcomes."

P4Mi is a Seattle-based non-profit established in 2010. P4 Medicine – shorthand for medicine that is Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory – utilizes advances in genomics and molecular diagnostics that have the potential to predict and prevent illness before it occurs, focus on health and wellness, and place patients, families and communities at the center of care. PeaceHealth will join two current P4Mi member institutions who direct P4Mi's work in advancing P4 Medicine through their participation in P4Mi's board of directors: the Seattle-based Institute for System Biology (ISB) and The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. 

"Bringing PeaceHealth on as our founding community health partner is a critical step in moving P4Mi  innovations forward," said Dr. Leroy Hood, chairman of P4Mi's board of directors and ISB co-founder and president, whose discoveries have permanently changed the course of biology and revolutionized the understanding of genetics, life and human health. "PeaceHealth has a long, successful history and mission of improving the health of patients and communities, and P4Mi is leveraging systems approaches and pioneering technologies that can further support PeaceHealth's mission and further improve how wellness and illness are managed. PeaceHealth will help us integrate emerging biologic science into community-based care models, and make innovations in wellness and health accessible to whole communities."

PeaceHealth consistently receives national recognition for innovations in patient-centered care, patient safety, and cost efficiency. Research published in the June 2008 edition of the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety ranked PeaceHealth as one of the top five health care systems in the country for quality of care, and the leading system in the West. PeaceHealth was also named one of America's top 50 best-performing health care systems in a 2009 Thomson Reuters study published by Modern Healthcare magazine.

PeaceHealth and P4Mi leaders will soon identify P4 pilot projects that will be launched over the next two years in PeaceHealth medical practices and communities. 

"By understanding an individual's genomic and molecular signature, the precepts of P4 Medicine will help transition from our one-size-fits all, illness-based care models, to highly proactive and personalized wellness care," said Mauricio Flores, P4Mi executive director. "By being highly effective and individualized, P4 Medicine will engage and support patients and families toward actively owning and participating in their healthcare decisions and behaviors."

PeaceHealth joins academic healthcare partner Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC) in the P4 Medicine consortium. OSUWMC is both payer and provider of healthcare services to its 55,000 employees and health plan members.

"Partnerships with organizations like PeaceHealth reinforce The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center's (OSUWMC) commitment to improve people's lives through personalized health care," says Dr. Steven G. Gabbe, OSUWMC CEO.  "Only when patients are fully engaged in their health care can we significantly improve outcomes and cost-effectiveness.

Dr. Clay Marsh, executive director of the Center for Personalized Health Care at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC) and P4Mi board member, along with Dr. Gabbe, added that "P4 Medicine will change the healthcare paradigm from disease to wellness and encourage physicians and scientists to accelerate discovery to application to change healthcare delivery – PeaceHealth's focus on community health, connectedness between patients and community healthcare resources, and patient activation adds a critical new dimension to this crucial effort."

"Our challenge is to engage our families and communities in ways which effectively change our choices and our behaviors—before diseases occur," added Dr. Marc Pierson, who leads the new PeaceHealth Center for Healthcare Innovation. "The health care industry demands that providers have the right technology and the best information at their fingertips to effectively support the care of their patients and communities. Serving as the founding P4Mi community health partner promises, over time, to significantly strengthen PeaceHealth's ability to further improve health care outcomes and lower costs."

The PeaceHealth Center for Health Care Innovation, scheduled to begin operations in July 2012, will prioritize both "focus" and "spread" of innovation, with an intentional bias toward those innovations that further attainment of the Triple Aim (Improve Experience, Improve Health of Populations, and Reduce Cost of Care).

P4 Medicine institute

www.p4mi.org

The P4 Medicine institute (P4Mi) is a Seattle-based non-profit institution established in 2010 by the Institute for Systems Biology and Ohio State University to advance the delivery of more effective and lower cost healthcare that predicts and prevents disease, tailors diagnosis and therapy to each individual and engages activated and networked consumers in the proactive pursuit of a quantified understanding of wellness; i.e. healthcare that is predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory (P4). P4 Medicine also links discovery science and clinical service delivery in a new cycle of accelerating biomedical innovation that applies systems biology, informatics and clinical research to the emerging personalized data cloud of health-related information. The term "P4 Medicine" was coined in 2003 by biotechnology visionary Dr. Leroy Hood, co-founder and president of the Institute for Systems Biology and chairman of the P4Mi board of directors.

Institute for Systems Biology

www.systemsbiology.org

The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is an internationally renowned, non-profit research institute headquartered in Seattle and dedicated to the study and application of systems biology. Co-founded by Leroy Hood, ISB seeks to unravel the mysteries of human biology and identify strategies for predicting and preventing diseases such as cancer, diabetes and AIDS. ISB's systems approach integrates biology, computation and technological development, enabling scientists to analyze many elements in a biological system rather than one gene or protein at a time. Founded in 2000, the Institute has grown to 13 faculty and more than 300 staff members; an annual budget of nearly $50 million; and an extensive network of academic and industrial partners.

PeaceHealth

www.peacehealth.org

PeaceHealth is a Washington-based not-for-profit Catholic health care system with major medical centers, critical access hospitals, medical groups and laboratories in Alaska, Washington and Oregon with approximately 17,000 caregivers (employees). Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, PeaceHealth has provided health care services to Northwest communities for more than a century. PeaceHealth consistently receives national recognition for innovations in patient-centered care, patient safety and cost efficiency.

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center  (OSUWMC)

www.medicalcenter.osu.edu

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC) was the first major public academic medical center to join the Personalized Medicine Coalition – a Washington, D.C.-based independent, non-profit group that works to advance the understanding and adoption of personalized medicine. As Ohio's pre-eminent comprehensive teaching and research university, and one of the nation's largest, The Ohio State University has a profound impact on its students, the economy, and the quality of life in Ohio and beyond by offering broad, deep, and high-quality educational opportunities, conducting research that advances knowledge and benefits society, and fulfilling its land-grant mission of outreach and public service. Ohio State is home to one of the most comprehensive health sciences campuses in the United States, providing an exceptional facilitating condition for trans-disciplinary collaboration in personalized medicine.

The Ohio State University's Center for Personalized Health Care (CPHC), created in 2005, facilitates and advocates for the creation and practice of healthcare methods based on an individual's genetic, environmental, behavioral and cultural factors. What results is a tailored approach to wellness, disease prevention and, when required, health care. Personalized health care overarches all Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC) initiatives.

The CPHC (www.cphc.osu.edu) serves as an advocate and facilitator of research, education, prevention and treatments designed to meet patients' individual needs. Its missions are to create a pipeline for innovation and accelerate the application and dissemination of discovery to realize the promise of personalized health care and advocate for PHC locally, nationally and internationally.

SOURCE PeaceHealth