Preliminary outcomes of preemptive warfarin pharmacogenetic testing at a large rural healthcare center

PURPOSE: As a preliminary evaluation of the outcomes of implementing pharmacogenetic testing within a large rural healthcare system, patients who received pre-emptive pharmacogenetic testing and warfarin dosing were monitored until June 2017. SUMMARY: Over a 20-month period, 749 patients were genotyped for VKORC1 and CYP2C9 as part of the electronic Medical Records and Genomics Pharmacogenetics (eMERGE PGx) study. Of these, 27 were prescribed warfarin and received an alert for pharmacogenetic testing pertinent to warfarin; 20 patients achieved their target international normalized ratio (INR) of 2.0-3.0, and 65% of these patients achieved target dosing within the recommended pharmacogenetic alert dose (± 0.5 mg/day). Of these, 10 patients had never been on warfarin prior to the alert and were further evaluated with regard to time to first stable target INR, bleeds and thromboembolic events, hospitalizations, and mortality. There was a general trend of faster time to first stable target INR when the patient was initiated at a warfarin dose within the alert recommendation versus a dose outside of the alert recommendation with a mean (± SD) of 34 (± 28) days versus 129 (± 117) days, respectively. No trends regarding bleeds, thromboembolic events, hospitalization, or mortality were identified with respect to the pharmacogenetic alert. The pharmacogenetic alert provided pharmacogenetic dosing information to prescribing clinicians and appeared to deploy appropriately with the correct recommendation based upon patient genotype. CONCLUSION: Implementing pharmacogenetic testing as a standard of care service in anticoagulation monitoring programs may improve dosage regimens for patients on anticoagulation therapy.