Healthcare’s one-size-fits-all approach to treating patients must be replaced with a personalized approach to medicine that focuses on individuals and the unique needs of each family member, says John Halamka, MD, chief information officer at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
According to Halamka, co-author of a new book—Realizing the Promise of Precision Medicine: The Role of Patient Data, Mobile Technology, and Consumer Engagement published by Elsevier—the “goal of the precision medicine movement is to give clinicians and patients access to the kinds of information needed to create individually tailored programs to treat a variety of diseases and to ward off those that are preventable.”