Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt today described the government’s role in developing a new generation of personalized health care, emphasizing health information technology as a keystone of that effort.
“The potential is huge – for protecting health, for preventing and pre-empting disease and for personalizing treatment according to each person’s unique biology,” he said in a speech at a conference on personalized medicine.
HHS also issued a 75-page report, “Personalized Health Care: Opportunities, Pathways, Resources,” that describes the many steps HHS and other federal agencies are taking to develop standards, tools and other ingredients of personalized health care.
Genomics is perhaps the most important new aspect of personalized health care, and HHS and its agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, have many projects underway to increase understanding of genetics and how genetic information is cataloged and retrieved.
As those projects bear fruit, he said, it will be possible to tailor treatments to individuals, based on their genetic makeup and medical history. But emerging issues, such as avoiding misuse of genetic information, will become more pressing.
The HHS report describes personalized health care as “a system in which doctors, pharmacists and other health care providers customize treatment and management plans for individuals. It will be founded upon vast amounts of information that will be readily accessible at clinics and hospital bedsides.”
“The driver is the many applications of information technology that have blossomed during the biomedical revolution,” the report states. “For example, tools like electronic capture will allow easy dissemination and flow of data about medical history, genetic variability and even patient preferences.”
One outcome, it predicts, will be a new doctor-patient relationship. “Patients can have access to better communication tools,” it states. “Interactive systems will allow patients to query electronically about health choices. Patients will have the opportunity to become more health literate and take more responsibility for their own health care.”
As for the role of health IT, it states that “Underpinning personalized health care is the confluence of two powerful tools: information technology and knowledge management. These forces will provide individualized health care know-how at an unprecedented level. The full potential of these forces cannot be realized unless electronic systems, clinical databases, and knowledge repositories employ interoperable standards and definitions.”
In one of many examples in the report, it says genetic tests soon could suggest to doctors the best treatment for a patient’s asthma. “Researchers have learned details about how variations in certain sets of genes affect the way people respond to asthma medicines, specifically inhaled steroids and beta agonists,” it states. “Testing for these genes will help doctors recommend the best treatment for individual patients. Scientists expect to develop prototype tests for the gene variants within a year.”
Besides more effective treatments, the report states that personalized health care will support prevention of some illnesses and enable practitioners to avoid making some treatment errors.
Leavitt said personalized medicine is not well-understood. “I suppose part of the problem is we’re all still trying to define it.”
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
