One of the next big shifts in patient care will be precision medicine will be “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person,” as the Precision Medicine Initiative describes it.
For physicians and researchers this means predicting more accurately which treatment and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in particular groups of people.
This is completely different from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach, in which treatment and prevention strategies are developed for the average person, with less consideration for the differences between individuals.
What does this mean for healthcare and health IT? A lot of new challenges. Because precision medicine and genomics generate massive volumes of varied and granular data, new approaches to data storage and exchange and new designs for electronic health records, for example, may be required. Physician education and patient communication are two other areas that will demand attention
Some advanced healthcare provider organizations, such as large academic medical centers, are already well-advanced in their precision medicine efforts. But most providers are still early in the journey, if they’re attempting it at all. But many are preparing today for what many think will be the next step in the evolution of healthcare.
This story, focused on precision medicine and other emerging technologies, is the sixth and final installment in Healthcare IT News‘ feature series, “Health IT Investment: The Next Five Years.”
The series offers interviews with primarily CIOs to learn from them the path forward through the priorities they set with their investments in six categories: AI and machine learning; interoperability; telehealth, connected health and remote patient monitoring; cybersecurity; electronic health records and population health; and precision medicine and other emerging…