PROJECT NARRATIVE A number of US employers are offering their employees confidential workplace genomic testing (wGT), a service that could inform employees of their genetic risk for certain treatable diseases but may also raise concerns about genetic privacy and workplace discrimination.

Project Narrative Currently, there are marked differences in variant classification among clinical laboratories, and genetic variant classification is currently in flux with improvements in the access to ethnically diverse reference data and new algorithms to predict the pathogenicity of variants. As variants are re-classified over time, there is currently no definitive guidance from professional organizations about how to handle this variant reclassification and who has the duty to re-classify variants and what those obligations are.

As genomic sequence data are being produced faster and at lower cost, the most significant challenge in clinical genetic testing today is variant classification. Currently, there are marked differences in variant classification among clinical laboratories, with clinically significant discrepancies in 29% of variants interpreted. Variants that were previously categorized as pathogenic are now known to be benign with the increasing availability of more ethnically diverse reference data, and this is issue is more common for individuals of non-European ancestry.