WARRN RUDA / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Dr. Greg Burke chats with Geisinger President and CEO Dr. David Feinberg at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville on Tuesday.
DANVILLE — Geisinger President and CEO Dr. David Feinberg rolled up his sleeve Tuesday and offered the first blood sample for the first-of-its-kind clinical DNA sequencing program in the country.
Feinberg first announced the program in May at the HLTH: The Future of Healthcare conference in Las Vegas and he said Geisinger is the nation’s first health care system to include DNA screening as part of a patient’s routine health exam.
Under the program, patients are screened to see if they have any variations of genes linked to certain cancers or cardiovascular disease. The information will help doctors better treat or prevent diseases in patients, he said.
“It feels like the future is here,” Feinberg said after becoming the first patient in the program at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville.
Feinberg said the screening was a gift to his family. It will allow him to say to his family if they are or aren’t at risk for something. If they are at risk, he said they can do something about it to make it better. He expects results in two to four weeks.
“To me, it’s great information that gives you knowledge and power,” he said.
Until now, the DNA screening was being done only through Geisinger’s research program called the MyCode Community Health Initiative.
More than 200,000 participants have helped build a bank of DNA samples to study the relationship between genes and disease.
“What we’ve seen here at Geisinger through our MyCode study already is being literally able to save hundreds of people’s lives,” Feinberg said.
Now, the testing will be part of a patient’s routine medical exam and results will be included in the patient’s medical records.
The program launches with Geisinger employees covered by Geisinger Health Plan as the first 1,000 patients enrolled.
Patients of either the Internal Medicine Clinic at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville or the Kistler Clinic in Wilkes-Barre will be the first eligible.
The goal is to eventually extend DNA sequencing to more than 3 million Geisinger patients, Feinberg said. He expects the program will be available to patients in a few months.
Feinberg compared the DNA sequencing program to mammograms, Pap smears, colonoscopies, cholesterol checks and other routine screenings that could save lives by detecting cancers and heart disease early. Patients can choose whether or not they want to have their DNA tested just like other screenings, he said.
He said DNA sequencing can detect genetic conditions such as Lynch syndrome that increases someone’s risk of colon cancer as well as malignant hyperthermia, a disorder that occurs in people who don’t metabolize anesthesia well.
The DNA sequencing program will start with healthy people to see if they have “something genetic going on that we can know about and do something about,” he said.
Geisinger, one of the nation’s largest health service organizations, serves residents throughout 45 counties in Northeast and central Pennsylvania as well as southern New Jersey.
The system has about 30,000 employees, 13 hospital campuses, two research centers and a health plan with about 583,000 members.