What new roles might emerge in hospitals as precision medicine becomes

As precision medicine becomes mainstream, hospitals and health systems are seeing shifts in roles and responsibilities across clinical, diagnostics, and pharmaceutical sectors. Anticipated roles and their required skills include:

• Genomic Pharmacist (or Pharmacogenomics Pharmacist): While traditional pharmacists primarily dispense medications and review drug orders, genomic pharmacists translate genetic and genomic data into defensible therapeutic recommendations ^[1]. They serve as practice-based leaders in pharmacogenomics ^[2], navigating logistical issues in genetic testing, pharmacy informatics, medication safety, drug information, and associated ethical considerations ^[3]. They also work in diagnostics and pharmaceutical sectors on companion diagnostics, labeling questions, and clinical content development at a system level rather than solely managing one patient at a time ^[4].
• Bioinformatics and Diagnostics Specialists: In support of precision medicine operations, health systems require specialized roles to handle data integration and software tools. For instance, staff use web-based bioinformatics platforms like Flype to securely accept multi-source data, handle secondary analysis and annotation of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, maintain variant repositories, assist with clinical interpretation, and update variant annotations as literature evolves ^[5]. These roles differ from standard hospital IT positions by focusing specifically on managing, annotating, and interpreting complex genomic variants for electronic health record integration.

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