Personalized Medicine, the Next Frontier
Nancy B. Finn is a journalist with an expertise in the implementation of digital communications in health care. This is her second guest post on e-patients.net:
When an individual patient visits his or her doctor with a problem, traditional clinical diagnosis is made and treatment is administered based on the patient’s symptoms, medical and family history and results of lab tests.
In the e-health world of the 21st century, personalized medicine, a new approach to treatment and analysis of patients’ health issues, promises to revolutionize that process. Personalized medicine looks not only at an individual’s symptoms, labs and medical history but at the individual’s unique clinical genetic and genomic markers to determine a treatment program. Because these factors differ for each human being, the disease they carry and how they will respond to treatment will differ as well. Taking this to another level, personalized medicine enables doctors to make accurate predictions and assumptions not only about an existing condition but to make predictions about a person’s potential to develop a disease. This will enable clinicians to treat patients proactively rather than reactively resulting in a better outcome. Read more
Your Health Information at Your Fingertips
Nancy B. Finn is a journalist with an expertise in the implementation of digital communications in health care and shared this story about personal health records:
I was recently hospitalized. Fortunately I did not have to go through the emergency department but was admitted directly to a room. When I arrived, the nurse assigned to my case sat down with me to go over my medical history and medications. Much to her surprise I provided her with my personal health record (PHR) that I had created several months earlier on the iHealth Record web site www.ihealthrecord.org. My PHR included information on the illnesses I had contracted; my family medical history, medical proxy, and most important my medications and allergies to medications and food. With this information, the nurse was able to complete our interview quickly and efficiently, confident that the information was accurate and up to date. She let me know that she had not run into a patient with a PHR before and that she was clearly impressed.
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