By Benjamin Ross
January 21, 2019 | Color Genomics is turning to cloud-based communication provider Slack to progress their genetic testing portfolio, and it’s paying off.
The Burlingame, CA-based genomics technology company has recently announced partnerships with healthcare organizations, including NorthShore University HealthSystem, as well as Illumina. Both efforts are part of Color’s mission to reach more people, explained Jill Hagenkord, Color’s Chief Medical Officer, last week during a panel at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
“The thing in genetics is, much of our data comes from, primarily, white men. In genetics, it’s particularly hard to understand what the genetic changes mean when you have that lack of diversity,” Hagenkord explained. “Part of the mission of the partnership with Illumina is to generate the polygenic risk scores for underrepresented populations and share that back with the wider community.”
Color Genomics was founded in 2015 with the goal of making it easy and affordable for people to access their genetic information. “It’s always been important to us to never leave anybody behind,” Hagenkord said.
Part of the secret sauce is automation. Basic tasks are entrusted to robot systems, leaving the scientists on staff to do the actual analyzing of samples.
For instance, access to genetic counselors is a well-known problem in genetic testing. “It’s something that was very carefully thought through at Color as we were building out our delivery model,” Hagenkord said. “Our engineers built out a system that automatically does a lot of the busy work that genetic counselors have to do. Things like calling insurance companies and build out pedigrees—all of that is done with software now. Our genetic counselors are able to much more efficiently touch each patient who has questions and concerns.”
The Color lab is automated too. “There’s no point in the process where a human will touch a sample or pipet,” Justin Lock, Color’s head of R&D, told Diagnostics World.
The result is a genetic test cheaper than most, dropping from thousands to only $249.
Picking Up the Slack
But while the automation is fine-tuned, Color experienced breakdowns in communication between staff and their robot-dominant system, and reached out to Slack for assistance in integration.
“When you’re building a population-scale healthcare company like Color, there are a number of avenues you can go down to do that,” Lock said. “The traditional approach is to integrate and build really sophisticated robotic labs that are massively expensive with huge throughput, but as a consequence aren’t really flexible at all.”
These robotic labs can also be a bit clunky when it comes to efficiency, said Lock. It’s not like a microwave, where the machine will beep really loud once it’s done. “When a lab robot is done, it’s usually completely silent. You might have a light flash that goes from green flashing once to green flashing a couple times.”
And if you have a large lab with staff scattered doing other work, you can lose precious time because you don’t know a machine has completed a process.
This problem resulted in Color wanting to take a hybrid approach to the way they approached automation, something that would allow them to maintain the agility of a small company while also utilizing cutting edge technology as it became clinically valid. Using Slack allowed Color to do just that, said Lock.
“We can integrate Slack directly into our robotic protocols so that, 15 minutes before a robot is done, we can send a message to an individual user and say, ‘The machine is almost done; start making your way there now.’ And when the machine is completely done we can send a second message reminding them to load up the next set of samples.”
Because most of Color’s staff is comprised of researchers with backgrounds in Silicon Valley, the company was aware of Slack’s communication system and how it might improve workflow.
“By the time I joined [Color in 2015], the lab had just been up and running, and we started, almost immediately, to integrate Slack into the lab processes,” Lock said. “We were finding, as most startups do, that we were incredibly short staffed and in need of effective ways to communicate information about what was going on with a particular sample. It was natural to transition to integrate Slack into those processes.”
Integration included the team at Color writing code on top of Slack’s solution that improved the communication and efficiencies of Color’s robotic tools with human monitoring at key touch points.
And the progress has been noticeably improving, said Lock. Color saw a 20% increase in daily throughput as a result of integrating Slack. “We’ve been able to measure probably the most objective and substantial difference just in the number of times we can iterate through a particular set of processes in the lab, just because there’s way less down time.”
“What you’re dealing with are these efficiencies that have a profound effect on turnaround time, accuracy, etc.,” said Lock. “These are things that are going back to physicians and individuals that are making decisions that can hopefully prevent cancer or heart disease. Those are tremendous things where these efficiencies matter on a scale of minutes to days and weeks that are critical.”
These efficiencies allow Lock and his team to focus on the core value of Color—“inside every sample tube is a human life.”
“We take that statement very seriously,” Lock said. “Any time we’re able to get data to the patient more quickly, more clearly, and of a higher quality, we going to optimize as much as we can to do that.”