What is Personalized Healthcare?
Personalized healthcare and personalized medicine are often used synonymously, but understanding the differences is important. Personalized medicine refers specifically to the use of genetics and genomics. An example of personalized medicine includes the use of specific tumor markers to guide therapy for breast cancer. We view personalized healthcare as a broader platform that includes genetics and genomics but also includes any other biologic information that helps predict risk for disease or how a patient will respond to treatments. An example of personalized healthcare would be the inclusion of specific biomarkers like Lipoprotein (a) that can help to better predict risk for heart disease or stroke in some individuals. These biomarkers can augment our traditional means of assessing risk based on age, menopausal status for women, diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol levels.
There are plenty of reasons to be excited about personalized healthcare:
- Cost and quality
The United States consistently ranks second worldwide in terms of dollars spent for healthcare, yet we are ranked 24th by the World Health Organization for life expectancy. Too often, we prescribe medicines by trial and error and a one-size-fits-all approach. But not everyone responds to a drug the same way. While most people may respond to a particular drug and dose, a handful of patients may have either very little effect or serious side effects from the same medication. Adverse side effects are a leading cause of hospitalization in the United States and a large contributor to healthcare spending. Personalized healthcare can help us predict the right therapy with the fewest side effects for individual patients. It can improve the quality of care and decrease cost at the same time.
- Getting patients involved in their care
Studies have shown that patients fill and take prescriptions as instructed only 60 percent of the time. Why is this? Many reasons likely exist, including a growing culture of concern regarding medication and side effects and a growing culture of mistrust of the medical system. With easy online sharing of information, patients can very easily learn and share their experiences — including negative experiences and medication side effects.
Intelmed on Personalized Healthcare
We believe diseases are treated easily because it can be routinely diagnose at an early stage. We continue to invest in our effort in discovering early detection and diagnostic technologies. With more research across a broad range of system we believe we can perfect our technology. If we’re successful, we believe this will be one of the most important discovery and scientific breakthrough and to solve the unsolved challenges of medicine. With Artificial Intelligence as a multiplier we are certain that in a very near future we can see breakthrough.