PGx ECHO: Free education on the possibilities of pharmacogenomics

Through the College of Pharmacy’s PGx ECHO group, health care professionals can receive free education on pharmacogenomics (PGx)— genetic testing used to understand how an individual’s unique makeup may affect their body’s reaction to specific medications. 

Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) is a telementoring model for educating and advising health care professionals, offering nearly 7,000 programs. Around two years ago, the College of Pharmacy became the hub of the nation’s first pharmacogenomics ECHO program, collaborating with several other health organizations around the Midwest, called “spokes.” Every third Friday of the month at noon, the PGx ECHO group meets over Zoom with a mission of “improving health professionals’ confidence in using PGx-guided patient care” and offering insight and consultation on real-world clinical cases, the team said. 

The program is led by Dr. Pamala Jacobson, distinguished professor in the college’s Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology (ECP), and supported by fellow professors Dr. Jeffrey Bishop, Dr. David Stenehjem, and Dr. Jacob Brown. As an expert in pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine, she believes PGx can offer patients “safer and more effective medications.” She said PGx ECHO is a great resource for health care professionals who are interested in implementing pharmacogenomics into their practice but are seeking additional  experience. 

“We're doing this to educate and we're trying to bring cutting-edge tools to health care,” Jacobson said. “We want pharmacists and others to use this tool and practice at the highest level possible.”

Once a genetic test is taken, as simple as a blood sample or saliva swab, a patient’s results can be available in their medical record and consulted any time they are considering a new medication. This would be increasingly useful information to have “as individuals grow older, have more health conditions and take more drugs,” Jacobson said. 

The PGx ECHO team finds providers who are using PGx in practice to present a short didactic presentation on drug gene pairs, meaning genetic variants that are important to a specific drug, before presenting a real, anonymized case from their clinic that embodies the usefulness of PGx. Participants are most often pharmacists, but physicians and genetic counselors also attend and present cases. 

“Case-based learning is more educational than a didactic lecture because you've got an actual patient who may have other chronic health diseases and taking many medications. They might have diabetes or a cardiovascular disease and that's on top of having a drug gene pair relevant to a mental health drug.  Pharmacogenomic variants that patients carry often are relevant to more than one drug,” Jacobson said. “It [PGx ECHO] is also a good way to see the application of knowledge that may have been learned in school, in a conference or in a lecture.”

Jacobson also noted that PGx has dominantly been implemented in academic medical centers in metropolitan areas, which is why PGx ECHO specifically hopes to connect with rural and underserved areas. 

“That's why ECHO is so beautiful, because you can reach everybody. You don't have to be part of the University of Minnesota to learn new technology, develop new skills, and apply innovative tools to improve care to your patients,” she said. “All you need is the link and to be a healthcare professional.”

To get involved with PGx ECHO, contact Alyssa Johnson at pgxecho@umn.edu. To learn more about PGx, check out this YouTube video: New Science Applied by an Existing Workforce.