What is Precision Medicine? is a general audience white paper by Dr. Kadija Ferryman and Mikaela Pitcan that introduces and outlines the emerging field of precision medicine; the effort to collect, integrate and analyze multiple sources of data in order to develop individualized insights about health and disease.
What is Precision Medicine?
Contemporary Issues and Concerns Primer
Kadija Ferryman,
Mikaela Pitcan
Report Summary
The primer outlines a number of key dimensions of precision medicine, including:
- The evolution from personalized to precision medicine;
- The focus of precision medicine research on collecting multiple forms of data, and harnessing the power of big data analysis; and
- The tension between focusing on individual responsibility versus systemic intervention.
This primer draws on work conducted through the Fairness in Precision Medicine project, a year-long exploratory study supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that aims to identify tensions in the emerging data-driven health research space; the possibility for unintended consequences of the research process; and discrimination that could result from implementing data-driven research insights in health.