The healthcare industry has always been an early adopter of technology innovation to facilitate better patient care. From the advances of AI and robotics to enhanced capabilities of IoT, technology has touched almost every aspect of healthcare nowadays. Today, the industry has moved from its conventional healthcare procedures to precision medicine, which harnesses an individual’s data to deliver personalized treatment.
Continue advancements and evolution of technologies are redefining the healthcare industry in several ways. These technological innovations offer new care potentials to improve health outcomes, lowering overall costs to patient care. The prevalent implementation of precision and personalized medicine technologies will entail the convergence of evolving education at the interface of engineering and medicine and policies that support new clinical trial designs, in order to scaling the use of electronic medical records (EMR) to drive clinical decision support.
According to the Precision Medicine Initiative, precision medicine is “an approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyles.” This care method allows doctors and researchers to envisage more precisely which treatment and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people. Although the term is relatively new, the concept has been a part of healthcare for many years.
Optimizing Precision Medicine
Precision medicine offers medical practitioners the opportunity to more carefully tailor early interventions to each individual patient. It helps analyze a patient medicine, their environment, genetic oddities to foresee the action of drugs and disease-causing agents on them. Predicting such reactions requires having all the data regarding a person’s genetics, their behaviors, health and medical history, and other germane information. This is where modern, advanced technologies come into the rescue, influencing the landscape of the global healthcare.
Technologies like AI, big data analytics, bioinformatics and the internet of things, among others are already proving their potentials. They have the ability to extend their influence over the sector by enabling precision medicine. Since this care procedure is based on data collection, analysis, and problem-solving driven by the analysis, such technologies are imperative and a perfect fit for it.
For instance, capitalizing on high performance computer capabilities, AI algorithms can now accomplish reasonable success in predicting risk in certain cancers and cardiovascular disease from available multidimensional clinical and biological data.
Furthermore, the integration of new-age technologies is able to transform the healthcare landscape to bring precision medicine into mainstream practice. By leveraging these technologies, doctors and clinicians can glean information on individual patients, right from their daily habits to complex, microscopic information such as their genetic code. They can also use these technologies to examine the information collected and envision outcomes and potential cures.