The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO)—a standardized vocabulary of phenotypic abnormalities associated with 7000+ diseases—is used by thousands of researchers, clinicians, informaticians and electronic health record systems around the world. Its detailed descriptions of clinical abnormalities and computable disease definitions have made HPO the de facto standard for deep phenotyping in the field of rare disease. The HPO’s interoperability with other ontologies has enabled it to be used to improve diagnostic accuracy by incorporating model organism data. It also plays a key role in the popular Exomiser tool, which identifies potential disease-causing variants from whole-exome or whole-genome sequencing data. Since the HPO was first introduced in 2008, its users have become both more numerous and more diverse. To meet these emerging needs, the project has added new content, language translations, mappings and computational tooling, as well as integrations with external community data. The HPO continues to collaborate with clinical adopters to improve specific areas of the ontology and extend standardized disease descriptions. The newly redesigned HPO website (www.human-phenotype-ontology.org) simplifies browsing terms and exploring clinical features, diseases, and human genes.
Genetic testing has the potential to revolutionize primary care, but few health systems have developed the infrastructure to support precision population medicine applications or attempted to evaluate its impact on patient and provider outcomes. In 2018, Sanford Health, the nation’s largest rural nonprofit health care system, began offering genetic testing to its primary care patients. To date, more than 11,000 patients have participated in the Sanford Chip Program, over 90% of whom have been identified with at least one informative pharmacogenomic variant, and about 1.5% of whom have been identified with a medically actionable predisposition for disease. This manuscript describes the rationale for offering the Sanford Chip, the programs and infrastructure implemented to support it, and evolving plans for research to evaluate its real-world impact.
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