Background: Pharmacogenomic Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) are considered to be the most feasible tool for adopting pharmacogenomic testing into clinical routine.
Objective: To discuss important factors for implementing pharmacogenomic CDSS into German hospitals.
Methods: We analyzed two relevant studies. Furthermore, we interviewed data privacy officers of three German university hospitals and examined relevant legal regulations in literature.
Results: There are three major barriers for implementing pharmacogenomic CDSS into German hospitals: (i) the legal uncertainty; (ii) the lack of machine-readable data; (iii) the remaining knowledge gap of both genetics and pharmacogenomics among physicians.
Conclusion: The implementation of passive clinical decision support (CDS) for somatic mutations in the form of structured pharmacogenomic reports might be the most feasible CDS feature for clinicians in German hospitals.
Keywords: Personalized medicine; clinical decision-making; pharmacogenetics.