CatherineAHajekMD

Summary

• I am an internist geneticist committed to transforming medical care to include genomics in routine clinical care. I am currently leading the preemptive genetic screening program at Sanford Health where we are developing resources which facilitate the application of genomics in medicine across all medical specialties including consenting, testing, return of results and patient and physician education. I am Physician Chair and Medical Director of Sanford Imagenetics. In this role, I led the strategic planning and launch of Sanford Health’s population genomics program, including the design of the testing platform, informatics infrastructure, and physician education critical to efforts to integrate genomics into patient care system-wide. The efforts I led culminated in 2018 with the launch of the Sanford Chip Program, an elective clinical test that provides preemptive population pharmacogenomic testing and screening for medically actionable predispositions with development underway for polygenic risk scores. The program has enrolled over 14,000 patients to date. The program I developed and the success of the Sanford Chip program has been a model for other systems to follow for expanding genomic medicine programs. In addition to my clinical implementation expertise, I have contributed to and led research efforts to accelerate the integration of novel applications of genomic medicine. My research during fellowship training focused on evaluating the predictive power in men versus women of polygenic risk scores for coronary artery disease.