NIH awards more than $54 Million to Kaiser Permanente to conduct healt...(ghly double the number of individuals in...),Health

A separate NIH GO grant of nearly $4 million was awarded to the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., to study personalized medicine and genomic tests for colon cancer. Researchers will use the grant money to evaluate two tests, one that determines whether colon cancer patients will respond to a commonly prescribed drug and another that tests for a genetic mutation that dramatically increases the chance of developing colon cancer.

Also awarded was a $7.2 million GO grant to develop a cardiovascular surveillance system for the Cardiovascular Research Network (a collaborative of 14 different health plans across the U.S. with approximately 11 million health maintenance organization members) and $3.3 million GO grant to create a National Research Database that will organize and leverage Kaiser Permanente's electronic health records.

Other NIH grants include research and the building of resources aimed at better understanding the causes and treatment of autism, autoimmune disease, breast cancer, chronic diseases, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, obesity, and successful aging; improving treatment for HIV-infected patients; better understanding the medical care burden of cancer; and improving post-acute care and rehabilitation for stroke patients. Other grants also will be used to study how to use natural language processing to more accurately extract data from the electronic medical record.

"We have a unique opportunity in front of us right now to transform and reform the way we deliver health care in this country," said John H. Cochran, MD, executive director of The Permanente Federation. "Kaiser Permanente believes that through evidence-based research and health information technology we can change how personalized health care is delivered."

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