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This summer, the Partners HealthCare Biobank introduced a new website with the potential to significantly reduce the cost of research: electronic consent. The website will enable BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) patients who wish to participate in the Partners Biobank to provide electronic consent from their computer or mobile device, enabling outreach to hundreds of thousands of patients.
The Partners Biobank is a research program designed to help researchers understand how people’s health is affected by their genes, lifestyle and environment. It is also aimed at accelerating medical research and cutting the cost of research across the Partners system by centralizing collection of blood samples. To date, more than 16,000 patients have provided consent to participate in the biobank, with 90 percent also providing blood samples. These blood samples are linked to clinical data from the electronic medical record and to data on family history, lifestyle and environment that are collected in an online survey. Samples and data are available to all Partners investigators with appropriate approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB).
“We’ve been tasked with recruiting 75,000 patients,” said Scott T. Weiss, MD, of BWH’s Department of Medicine, and principal investigator of the biobank. “The only cost-effective way we can achieve this objective is to take the informed consent process online.”
The Pilot Project
As part of a pilot project, over the course of the summer, patients were invited to participate in the Partners Biobank via email. More than 6,000 patients received an email from Patient Gateway, the patient portal at BWH and MGH. If interested, patients could log into Patient Gateway and, from there, go to the Partners Biobank website. The website provides video and educational content, and enables patients to review the biobank’s consent form and provide their electronic signature.
Also part of the pilot project, staff sent surveys to patients and physicians, and conducted interviews with patients. The purpose of the surveys and interviews was to obtain feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, on the electronic consent process.
“We want to learn from physicians and patients, and to improve our website and resources based on their feedback,” said Susan Slaugenhaupt, PhD, co-investigator of the Partners Biobank.
Moving Forward
Now that the pilot project is complete, the biobank will send emails to all BWH and MGH patients who have Patient Gateway accounts.
The biobank has made several resources available to physicians, including the course “A Practical Guide to Biobanking for Biomarker and Personalized Medicine Research” that will be delivered on Oct. 1, as well as an online course on the Partners Biobank, which will be launched on the continuing education website.
The biobank team continues to refine its processes and systems that enable enrolling large numbers of patients into its research program. The next step for electronic consent is to integrate with MyChart, the new patient portal that will be rolled out as part of Partners eCare implementation.
To learn more about the Partners Biobank, visit biobank.partners.org, email biobank@partners.org or call 617-525-6700.