Precision Health and Nursing Care in the Digital Age

Abstract

Individualizing healthcare and treatment is a core value of the healthcare sector because of the professional importance of accurately diagnosing, treating, and caring for people who are ill (Ho et al., 2020). Although clinicians may have been working to personalize care to the individual health needs of their patients throughout the history of medicine, predicting how specific individuals will respond to specific treatments or healthcare interventions has long been a goal impossible to achieve. Precision health, a broad concept that includes precision medicine, is a term that refers to personalized healthcare based on a person's unique genetic composition as well as related lifestyle, social, economic, cultural and environmental influences that is designed to help individuals achieve well-being and optimal health (Fu et al., 2019). The term "personal medicine" is frequently used in the healthcare sector to describe a population-based approach. However, this approach is less-individualized than precision medicine. Several rising trends in healthcare are providing doctors and nurses with the tools necessary to better access and manage the vast amounts of data needed to provide individualized care in a manner that both improves outcomes and lowers costs. By focusing on health and wellness, nurses can have a meaningful impact on reducing healthcare cost. One way to support the development of precision health initiatives within the nursing context is to develop interventions that match patients' complex phenomena. Tailoring intervention is an intervention method that selects and applies strategies to treat each patient based on her / his specific characteristics (Salmond & Echevarria, 2017). Furthermore, continuous-tuning interventions are one class of tailoring that adjusts and tunes interventions to the changing needs of individuals based on their data (Hekler et al., 2020). Precision health links health-related research and practice as well as medicine, population health, and public health. Nursing roles are important in the implementation of precision health. They provide precision delivery of medications based on knowledge of pharmacogenetics, patient and family education related to the meaning of genomics, health and family assessments, and critical feedback and insights on the feasibility of implementing new technologies into clinical point-of-care or community workflows. Therefore, the domain knowledge of precision health is critical to clinical practice. In line with the rapid pace of development in digital health technologies, the role of medical informatics in advancing personalized healthcare and precision healthcare has been increasingly emphasized (Hussein, 2020). As medical care and healthcare have entered the information era, digital health technologies provide significant opportunities to optimize clinical care. Using digital health technology should provide opportunities to better generate evidence and provide evidence-based medical care and healthcare. To share more information related to clinical trends in precision health and digital care, we have invited expert groups to share their related expertise and experiences. We do hope nurse professionals and healthcare providers are inspired by this topic and the articles in this issue of the journal.