Leon Barretto

Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on their predicted response or risk of disease. Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on their predicted response or risk of disease.

Personalized medicine holds many promises to radically change health care by using the latest omics technologies and medical record data to allow medical professionals to tailor therapeutic strategies to each individual patient. By moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach, personalized medicine aims to deliver the right preventative or therapeutic intervention to the right patient at the right time as well as decrease costs for the health care system by overcoming the costly and sometimes fatal trial and error method. Digital medicine is a necessary enabler in the delivery of personalized medicine. The mainstay of digital medicine is the electronic health record (EHR), but mobile devices, hospital and laboratory systems, and nationwide medical information systems also play a role

Digitalization can contribute to improve the healthcare sector by upscaling good practices. Three are the main goals to achieve in order to scale up best practices:

• Standardization, so that data can be collected and organized in the same way all
• Exchange of information
• Patients and doctors’ engagement

While everyone agrees that they should work to achieve a personalized medicine approach in the long-run, concerns were sparked about the feasibility of this shift in a short time frame. At the moment, a personalized medicine approach seems too expansive to afford for most of parts of the world; such a shift implies first rethinking medicine and make sure that new investments pay off.

Precision medicine’s rosy predictions haven’t come true. We need fewer promises and more debate