From the January 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
What’s driving precision medicine?
Many factors are converging that support the adoption of precision medicine and make it more robust, including:
• As health systems merge and acquire new hospitals and medical practices, a growing number of EMRs, EHRs and health information exchanges (HIEs) that cover a significant number of patients are becoming interconnected. With the right open technology solutions in place that enable interoperability and access to the right data, health systems can provide individualized prevention and treatment plans, which drives more effective population-health management.
• Patients are more interested in participating in their care, especially when they get access to their own data. There are myriad devices on the market that are relevant — from wearable devices that measure activity and sleep quality, to wireless scales that integrate with smart-phone apps, to medical devices that send alerts (such as pacemakers and insulin-level trackers). The data from these devices contribute to a robust longitudinal patient record, which providers can easily access with the right technological tools.
• mHealth advances allow consumer data to be captured using cell phone technology, and patients can be monitored remotely with telehealth and virtual consultations.
• Clinicians have the ability to see which inherited genetic variations within families contribute both directly and indirectly to disease development. By identifying a patient’s susceptibility to disease and anticipating how he or she will respond to a particular therapy, providers can identify the best treatment options for optimal outcomes. For more effective outcomes, providers can now adjust care plans and treatment protocols based on that data. Personalized medicine means anticipating patients’ needs with evidence and knowledge-based solutions. Precision medicine can make that goal a reality.
Bringing value from bench to bedside
Precision medicine is about aggregating all forms of relevant data to enable different types of real-time data explorations. There are two critical areas that need a very large number of data sets to produce results:
• Medical research with scientific modeling.
Precision medicine can be leveraged to advance the ways in which large data sets are collected and analyzed, which leads to new approaches to managing disease.
• Clinical applications. Treatment plans and decisions can be greatly improved by identifying individuals at higher risk of disease, dependent on the prevalence and heritability of the disease. This is referred to as cognitive support at the point of impact. To support this approach, more control is needed in real time over macro variables such as genomics, proteomics, metabolism, medication, exercise, diet, stress, environmental exposure, social and behavioral factors and more. Precision medicine provides a platform that has an extensive number of data sets and the ability to easily create custom data sets to capture these types of variables.
