Health care is being inundated with data—biologic data derived from advances in technology, namely next-generation sequencing and individual patient-level data found in electronic health records (EHRs) including imaging and laboratory test results, medical and prescription claims, and even monitoring information originating in remote, personal health devices. While the health care system is moving toward data-driven medicine to improve care and contain costs, clinicians can’t keep up with emerging genomic information in the literature and even data derived from individual patients. “We are trying to improve the speed and accuracy of diagnosis by using health information technology,” says Robert El-Kareh, M.D., an assistant professor of bioinformatics at the University of California, San Diego. “Physicians are under enormous time pressure, especially for outpatients, and there is an information overload with alerts.” He adds that adding genotypic information may add to that information overload so  “some thought needs to be put into integrating information that has evidence so it can make a real clinical impact.” The realization of personalized medicine is dependent upon a technology-based transformation of the health care system. The technological challenge of sequencing an individual’s genome has been achieved. Now, the challenge migrates to analyzing raw genomic data for actionable […]