The Impact and Potential of Precision Medicine in Modern Healthcare
1. Introduction
Medicine, introduced as a formal system of care delivery after the Quantitative Revolution (17th century), today stands on the threshold of its next great leap. Medicine is poised to transition into a modern scientific discipline from its current majority organic grip; a capability that is being made possible through the comprehensive use of device sensors and analytics. The soon-to-be-here reality - trillions of data points available on the health status of individuals - is an incredibly exciting chapter in the history of medicine. It will also be a true expression of engineering and management in human. In popular literature, there is often confusion of terms in the context of health and healthcare. The word health is used casually to denote physical, mental and societal well-being; and healthcare usually refers to all health services and products. Medicine is a vital part of healthcare, and it is the focus of the next-generation medical management, Precision Medicine. Note that broad definitions of health and healthcare are an absolutely essential prelude to this chapter technology-enabled health era.The perfect free essay in just 5 minutes: it's your turn!Let's write
2. Fundamentals of Precision Medicine
In its core, precision medicine is about making optimal therapy choices for the right patients at the right time. This is based on the understanding of what makes each individual unique on a molecular level. Broadly speaking, the pursuit of ever greater precision in patient management, by integrating patient-specific and population-level data, and by exploiting current and new support technologies and systems for healthcare provision, has been the overriding driver of the healthcare process over the past few hundred years. Hence, it is not surprising that precision medicine in the 21st century healthcare marketplace is seen as the logical next step in this long history. Ironically, though, while precision medicine provides a high-profile banner that has attracted political, industry, research funding and public attention, arguably the healthcare system has been working towards molecular-level precision of disease diagnostics and patient management for the past century and a half or more.
2.1. Definition and Principles
Before introducing precision medicine and its main principles, a clear understanding of the term "precision" is needed. Malcolm X once said, "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against." This provocative quote precisely outlines the main principle of precision medicine: treating the right patient with the right drug at the right dose at the right time; and it is "right," no matter who argues against it. From DNA to the words the unfortunate Malcolm X was speaking, things are encoded. The goal of precision medicine is to understand how all these things may be translated into each other and to use this understanding to improve the patient's health as much as possible in the most effective and efficient way. Precision medicine is a new conceptual paradigm in which treatment and prevention approaches are built on the individual specifics of a patient (his/her 'emphasized' variant). Until now, every diagnosis and treatment plan in clinical practice has always been at least slightly different for each patient, depending on the patient's unique genetic, biochemical, epigenetic, metabolic, social, economic, and other characteristics, as well as the time, place, etc. More detailed patient's examination "in the right place at the right time" will allow "tuning" the diagnosis and treatment in such a way that the hoped-for improvement of the treatment outcome will be achieved, either by providing better efficiency or fewer side effects, or both.
2.2. Technologies and Tools
Rapid advances in technology continue to push forward the boundaries of what we can achieve using the existing Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques in combination with other -omics methods. This has led to a significant reduction in cost and time of such analyses to the point that it could easily be implemented in large-scale applications, thus providing a detailed window to human phenotypic variation and detailed assessment of the potential impact of the environment and behavior of individuals on their health. Genetic information of the individual can be utilized to stratify populations for disease, screen for mutations linked with an already established genetic risk, predict drug response, monitor disease progress and inspect potential environmental genetic interaction. Thereby, Precision Medicine becomes an added layer for keeping individuals healthy and an important part of a sufficient health economy for the 21st century. The actu