A Quick Overview; Precision Medicine Paving a New Era in Patient Centric Care

 

Precision medicine (also known as individualized medicine or personalized medicine) is an emerging field that tailors the treatment according to the individual’s lifestyle, genetic makeup, and environment. This allows researchers and doctors to forecast more precise treatment and preventive strategies for a particular disease. It is achieved by using scientific techniques and statistical analysis of complex health situations.

Precision medicine is a health care management approach that advocates the personalized management of health, with individualized treatments, medical procedures, practices, or items being tailor to a specific subpopulation of patients. The practice emphasizes the precision of end points in assessing both the severity and duration of disease and the quality of the treatment provided. The goal of precision medicine is to decrease the overall treatment burden, while maximizing the individual's capacity for healing.

For this reason, it has been successful in reducing health-related deaths, spending, and productivity through improved access to accurate diagnosis and treatment, and prevention of adverse health events. It has also helped to reduce financial costs by promoting the use of accurate tests and therapies, resulting in more efficient use of health-care resources and increased satisfaction among patients and their families.

Moreover, precision medicine allow researchers to better design trials and treatments that target the individual factors that determine the success or failure of cancer treatments. The key will be to determine the relative importance of genetics, immune function, lifestyle, diet, and other environmental factors. Over the years, precision medicine has gained popularity due to positive results obtained by precision medicine in treating cancer.

With the increasing prevalence of cancer worldwide, the demand for precision medicine is also increasing. For instance, according to the National Cancer Institute (NIH), in 2020, around 1,806,590 new cases of cancer were expected to be diagnosed in the United States and 606,520 people were expected to die from the disease.