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Vanderbilt Genome-Electronic Records (VGER) Project: QRS Duration

An important potential enabling resource for Personalized Medicine is the combination of a DNA repository with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems sufficiently robust to provide excellence in clinical care and to serve as resources for analysis of disease susceptibility and therapeutic outcomes across patient populations. The Vanderbilt EMR is a state of the art clinical and research tool (that includes >1.7 million records), and is associated with a DNA repository which has been in development for over 3 years; these are the key components of VGER, the Vanderbilt Genome-Electronic Records project, a part of NHGRI's eMERGE network. The VGER model acquires DNA from discarded blood samples collected from routine patient care, and can link these to de-identified data extracted and readily updated from the EMR. The phenotype we analyze here is the QRS duration on the electrocardiogram, since slow conduction (indicated by longer QRS duration) is a marker of arrhythmia susceptibility.