Graduate student Janina Jeff presenting her work in eMERGE at the American Society of Human Genetics in San Francisco (2012).
The electronic MEdical Records and GEnomics (eMERGE) Network is a consortium of biobanks linked to electronic health records (EHRs) funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. The Crawford lab was affiliated with eMERGE I and II as part of the Vanderbilt Genome-Electronic Records (VGER) study site, which leveraged the Nashville, TN biobank BioVU developed by Vanderbilt University. The primary goals of early eMERGE Network work included validating computable phenotypes and their use in genomic research as well as using these data for genomic discovery for clinical outcomes using genome-wide association studies. The first phases of eMERGE also included work in return of research results to participants and developing clinical decision support for clinically relevant variants such as pharmacogenomics.