Genetic pioneer leaves Alabama where healthcare challenge too great (al.com) {BC/BS won't pay}
Updated Jan 16; Posted Jan 16
By Lee Roop
lroop@al.com
Nationally known genetic researcher Dr. Howard Jacob is leaving Alabama less than three years after being lured here, and his reasons speak to challenges facing genetic medicine here and nationwide.
"The hard part is that reimbursement for genomics is just not there," Jacob said. "I think everybody was hoping we'd be able to move this faster on the clinical side. Having Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama controlling 92 percent of healthcare in the state has made this quite a challenge."
Jacob officially started his new job today as vice president of genomic research for the pharmaceutical research company AbbVie in Chicago. He had been executive vice president for medical genomics and chief medical genomics officer at Huntsville's HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
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Recruited by HudsonAlpha, Jacob and the team arrived in 2015 to great excitement. Best known among its accomplishments was opening the Smith Family Clinic for Genomic Medicine on HudsonAlpha's campus. The clinic, which is still seeing patients, uses HudsonAlpha's ability to do rapid sequencing of a person's genetic code to analyze mysterious diseases.
The cost of such a genomic profile is $6,000 now, a dramatic drop from the earliest days of research in the field, but Jacob said Alabama's dominant insurance provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, won't pay for it.
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more: http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2018/01/genetic_medicine_pioneer_leave.html
