Abstract
Personalized healthcare holds the promise of ensuring that every patient receives optimal wellness promotion and clinical care based upon his or her unique and multi-factorial phenotype, informed by the most up-to-date and contextually relevant science. However, achieving this vision requires the management, analysis, and delivery of complex data, information, and knowledge. While there are well-established frameworks that serve to inform the pursuit of basic science, clinical, and translational research in support of the operationalization of the personalized healthcare paradigm, equivalent constructs that may enable biomedical informatics innovation and practice aligned with such objectives are noticeably sparse. In response to this gap in knowledge, we propose such a framework for the advancement of biomedical informatics in order to address the fundamental information needs of the personalized healthcare domain. This framework, which we refer to as a “4I” approach, emphasizes the pursuit of research and practice that is information-centric, integrative, interactive, and innovative.
Highlights
The objective of personalized healthcare is to ensure that each patient has the best clinical outcome by tailoring both preventative measures and treatments to meet their unique needs and characteristics
An innovative and paradigm-shifting approach to conceptualizing personalized healthcare has been described by Weston and Hood using the moniker of “Predictive Personalized (P4) Medicine” - where it was proposed that our fundamental approach to disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment must transition from being a primarily reactive model to one that is predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory [1]
In order to further contextualize and illustrate the potential benefits of the proposed “Information centricity Integration (4I)” approach to personalized healthcare, in the discussion below, we provide a exemplary P4-focused use case, and compare and contrast Biomedical Informatics approaches to addressing that use case’s information needs and implemented based upon:
Summary
The objective of personalized healthcare is to ensure that each patient has the best clinical outcome by tailoring both preventative measures and treatments to meet their unique needs and characteristics Achieving such a vision requires the collection and application of the best possible data, information, and knowledge during each patient encounter, and, learning from each encounter and engaging patients and their families in the healthcare process. As the range of data types needed to deliver personalized healthcare expands in complexity and size, such an information-centric approach will require systems-level approaches to data, information, and knowledge management that extend well beyond singular information systems. Doing so will require the creation of partnerships and funding models capable of supporting such innovation, given the nearly tectonic shifts occurring in our national research enterprise
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