Abstract
The field of precision medicine explores disease treatments by looking at genetic, socio-environmental, and clinical factors, thus trying to provide a holistic view of a person's health. Public health, on the other hand, is focused on improving the health of populations through preventive strategies and timely interventions. With recent advances in technology, we are able to collect, analyze and store for the first-time large volumes of real-time, diverse and continuous health data. Typically, the field of precision medicine deals with a huge amount of data from few individuals; public health, on the other hand, deals with limited data from a population. With the coming of Big Data, the fields of precision medicine and public health are converging into precision public health, the study of biological and genetic factors supported by large amounts of population data. In this paper, we explore through a comprehensive review the data types and use cases found in precision medicine and public health. We also discuss how these data types and use cases can converge toward precision public health, as well as challenges and opportunities provided by research and analyses of health data.
Highlights
Over the past decade, there has been an increased interest in the field of precision medicine
We argue that precision medicine and public health are complementary, as shown in Figure 2; further, if Big Data is the glue that holds all this health data and analytics together for precision medicine and public health, it can help to promote a convergence between the two fields into precision public health
To achieve the two goals defined in the introduction, the paper will answer the following research questions: (i) What are the relevant data types related to precision medicine? (ii) What are the relevant data types related to public health? (iii) What are the relevant uses of data in precision medicine? (iv) What are the relevant purposes of data usage in public health? (v) How can the uses of data types raised in the previous questions promote convergence between precision medicine and public health into precision public health?
Summary
There has been an increased interest in the field of precision medicine. This field explores the development of targeted treatments for individuals based on genetic, environmental, clinical, and social factors. The National Institute of Health defines precision medicine as an “approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person” [1], with the goal of accurately identifying which treatments and preventions will be more effective in which population groups [2]. Precision medicine is about having a holistic understanding of an individual’s health to create more precise treatments or prevention programs for specific traits and profiles in a population [3]. Genetic information from patients with a shared disorder can be used to develop new drugs that could be used in the population with this shared disorder [3, 4].
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