Personalized Health Care in 2013: A Status Report on the Impact of Genomics

Posted on | December 5, 2013 | Comments Off on Personalized Health Care in 2013: A Status Report on the Impact of Genomics

Ralph Snyderman M.D.

Dr. Snyderman, Chancellor Emeritus of Duke University Health System, and champion of personalized and prospective health care, updates his vision and predicts where we are heading next.

“As Chancellor for Health Affairs at Duke University in the latter part of the 1990s, I recognized emerging opportunities to abandon our reactive, sporadic, ‘one size fits all’ approach to health care and instead adopt an approach that is proactive, strategic, and personalized. I firmly believed that the 21st century would herald a transformation in our approach to the practice of medicine. By the early 2000s, I was touting personalized health care as the second great transformation of medicine, the first having been the introduction of science into the practice of medicine roughly a century before. In 2003 Duke created and launched one of the nation’s first personalized health care programs, Duke Prospective Care, which we made available to all university employees.

To understand the impact that genomics has had on today’s health care, it helps to briefly consider the history of medicine [8] (read on HERE)