The Cleveland Clinic has launched a new Center for Personalized Healthcare "for the identification, analysis, adoption and integration of select new services and technologies that will allow for personalized care of patients," according to a news release from the clinic.

Dr. Kathryn Teng, a primary-care physician, has been selected to direct the new center.

Teng is an assistant professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University and has served as director of general internal medicine grand rounds at Cleveland Clinic since 2007. She also has served as the patient experience officer for the Medicine Institute of Cleveland Clinic since 2008, according to the release. She also founded the Voice of the Patient Advisory Council for the Medicine Institute.

Teng said in an interview that one focus for the first year at the center will be on information in the patient's family medical history—information largely already available in the clinic's electronic health-record system—and the development of clinical-decision support tools to bring the relevant information to physicians seamlessly at the point of care.

"One of the challenges that we have with getting genetic information into clinical care, there is an educational component, and the other part is, physicians are just so tight for time," Teng said. "We're just strapped. If we want to incorporate this information we want to work it into the work flow."

"We have already a team of genetic counselors and a bunch of clinicians to develop the workflow," Teng said.