What does personalized care really mean?
Personalized care. Precision medicine. The two terms are often used interchangeably. One key difference, however, is that personalized care is more comprehensive.
According to this Becker’s Hospital Review white paper, “Precision medicine is an essential piece of personalized care … However, precision medicine specifically refers to the medical treatment of patients, whereas the term personalized care represents an overarching philosophy for patient care.”
Johns Hopkins’ broad scope
The research happening at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, is one of my favorite examples of personalized care precisely because of its comprehensive approach. It’s comprehensive not just from the standpoint of the amount of data it analyzes and number of diseases it addresses, but also in terms of the far-reaching potential of the insights it uncovers.
Scientists and physicians there are tapping vast amounts of data from clinical care, genomics, and even wearable devices to better predict disease progression and pinpoint individual treatments. They’re doing so with a customized cloud-based platform based on Microsoft Azure that uses AI, machine learning, and IoT to gain a better understanding of nine diseases—and they plan to expand the number of diseases and type of data that they analyze.
The team conducts big data investigations into patients treated for prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis, pancreatic cancer, cardiac arrhythmias, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and more. The research could lead to earlier diagnosis, more calibrated treatment, lower costs, and the potential for healthier populations.
Scaling individualized care
Johns Hopkins’ research to better understand diseases—and ultimately improve diagnoses, create better prevention tactics, and develop cures—will become all the more impactful when stakeholders across the health ecosystem can make use of its findings.
Scaling precision medicine insights and tools to all of those who can benefit empowers comprehensive personalized care. And that’s what the state of Maryland aims to do by facilitating a one-of-a-kind alignment among payers, providers, and research institutions.
Maryland’s regional health information exchange, CRISP, already enables inter-entity exchange of patient records. Now it’s evolving to become an exchange for precision health interventions. The intention is that CRISP will serve as the delivery backbone for connecting academic medicine and community-based providers—to rapidly increase the reach of insights and tools.
Ultimately, that’s what personalized care is about. Extraordinary new data insights, better care coordination and health team collaboration, and personalized ways of engaging and treating patients all come together for individualized care at scale. This transformational approach can help the health system achieve the quadruple aim of enhancing both the patient and provider experience, improving the health of populations, and lowering the overall cost of care.
Together with our partners, we’re dedicated to helping our customers achieve the quadruple aim, while also helping them meet their security needs and safeguard the privacy of PHI. And our customers have peace of mind when innovating with us thanks to our Shared Innovation Principles that provide clarity around co-creating technology. We value our customers and partners’ expertise and don’t seek to own it. Rather, we help them monetize their technology assets.
To learn more about personalized care—what drives it, the technologies behind it, and other real-world examples—you can read the Becker’s Hospital Review white paper: “Let’s make healthcare personal.”
Also, keep an eye out for my upcoming blog on clinical analytics and another by my colleague Doug Seven on interoperability; both topics are key drivers for personalized care.
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