Principles for Developing Patient Avatars in Precision and Systems Medicine.

Abstract

The day is drawing near when each patient can be made into a SuperModel—not a fashion model, but a digital or virtual model (see companion paper Brown, in review). Such representation of a patient can also be termed a patient avatar (The Discipulus Project, 2013). Principles to help guide successful implementation of these SuperModels are addressed in this article, including efficiency and cost-effectiveness (Figure ​(Figure11). Figure 1 Emerging principles for precision and systems medicine. A patient-clinician-technician alliance will be needed to work effectively with patient avatars in precision and systems medicine. The technician will feed data from the clinician and the patient ... Patient-clinician-technician alliance A patient-clinician-technician alliance will be needed for optimal care. The patient will interact with the clinician and technician, while the technician guides input of information into the SuperModel. Upon availability of model results, the technician will help interpret output for the clinician and the patient (The Discipulus Project, 2013). Multiple levels of support among the patient's health care team will be needed for shared clinical decision-making, buttressed by patient engagement and involvement of kinship and social networks. Thus, the health care team, patient, and kinship and social networks should be educated about the probabilistic (as opposed to deterministic) nature of SuperModel output. This would be facilitated by systems medicine counseling (Brown, in review). Various clinical decision support (CDS) tools are being developed for research and clinical use (e.g., http://www.myhealthavatar.eu, http://www.myresults.org), which help physicians decipher results and communicate with patients and their networks.