Precise and Personalized Medicine

I do not know about you, but some of my favorites gifts are the ones that are made just for me. It could be my name engraved in a piece of jewelry or a calendar filled with family photos. Quite simply, these objects are the dearest, because they were carefully thought out for me. The arena of precision medicine is simplistic in spirit, but there is exquisite complexity in the technology to deliver this medicine. With each passing year, the ability to pinpoint the problem and fine tune treatments is moving at a fast clip. Unfortunately, for many with chronic or life threatening conditions such as cancer, the pace of science cannot move fast enough. The benefits of precision medicine, three technologies that enable precision medicine, and the field of personalized medicine will be discussed.

Precision Medicine

According to Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang (2009), precision medicine is part of a continuum and is “the provision of care for diseases that can be precisely diagnosed, whose causes are understood, and which consequently can be treated with rules-bases therapies that are predicatively effective” (p. 44). It takes years of research and trial and error to get to this point, but it is a destination worth making. The are several benefits to precision medicine and these benefits may be found across healthcare organizations. It is hard to dispute that saving time, money and lives is not a very good thing. First, patient and providers are able to save time by swiftly moving from the diagnosis to treatment with the highest probability of working (Christensen et al., 2009). Next, reducing the amount of resources (time and cost) spent on treatments that are not effective has a direct impact on the financial implications of provid...

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