How effectively does your healthcare infrastructure support precision medicine?

Over the past decade, technology has helped accelerate healthcare transformation at a swift and steady pace. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has now reached a whole new level. Consequently, the overnight healthcare IT revolution has redefined the entire care delivery system. Now patients can get access to high-quality care virtually, from the comfort of their homes, without having to travel long distances and spend hours waiting in the lobbies in order to fulfil their primary healthcare needs.

According to recent trends, this change is here to stay! Furthermore, increased demand will likely emerge for a proactive and personalized care delivery model. A system that enables healthcare providers to gain a comprehensive understanding of patients' needs and tailor care accordingly. With an increasing demand for personalized care, healthcare organizations are now increasingly focused on a personalized medicine approach that appears to reshape the conventional healthcare delivery model.

What is "Personalized Medicine" or "Precision Medicine"?

There is no such thing as one size fits all in patient care, which equally applies to medicine. As individuals have different natures and personalities, their bodies also are defined by unique characteristics.

Precision Medicine is one of the emerging approaches of the next generation healthcare system. It helps to gain an in-depth understanding of an individual patient's physiology through a targeted approach based on patient-specific attributes such as genetic characteristics, environmental factors, and lifestyle in order to prevent diseases earlier and determine the appropriate treatment plans.

Precision medicine represents a modern approach that assists with the prevention and treatment of diseases by considering the individual variability of each patient. In other words, precision medicine aims to provide the right medication at the right time to the right patient by accurately analyzing and understanding the molecular events responsible for the disease, rather than treating the patients as an average based on the symptoms.

To sum up, the conceptual transition from the traditional medicine approach to the precision medicine system is a shift from generalized patient care to personalized care delivery.

The traditional medicine method involves treating a population as an average group of patients suffering from similar disorders or manifesting similar symptoms. Thus, benefits do not reach out to all patients. Some patients receive benefits, some do not receive benefits, and some end up experiencing adverse effects from the medicine.

The precision medicine system, however, identifies patients as individuals by stratifying them based on their genetic information, current and future risks, and lifestyle in order to categorize them into a healthy and high-risk population. It helps care providers to keep track of each patient's needs, foster treatment plans based on their unique requirements, and deliver personalized care with improved outcomes.

But, the transition from a generalized care management system to a personalized care delivery system isn't as simple as it seems. It requires a comprehensively integrated infrastructure that connects multiple and disparate data sources from various patient information systems. The unified infrastructure aggregates each patient's information generated along their care journey from several points of engagement, then interprets it to provide a detailed analysis of the patient's health activities. Care providers can utilize this data to understand the unique and complex needs of individual patients, monitor their health, and predict their current and future health risks in order to implement preventative measures and develop specific medicine and treatment plans for them.

Conclusion:

In order to develop specific medicine based on individual physiological needs, healthcare providers need access to complete and accurate information, which can be utilized to deeply understand the patient’s requirements and meet their needs.

Thus, a connected healthcare infrastructure that orchestrates the flow of data and makes it available for all the caregivers in real-time at the point of care is essential. It creates a well-organized and fully-interoperable care delivery system that improves provider communication and care team coordination in each patient care journey to help deliver personalized experiences and manage the patient population more effectively.