In his State of the Union Address this January, President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) that was launched with a $215 million investment. PMI aims to enable a new era of medicine through research, technology, and policies that will lead to the development of individualised, tailored treatments for patients.

PMI is looking for new activities that will help make this important programme a reality. These activities could include:

  • The development of robust APIs in electronic health record systems that can support patients accessing their clinical data and donating it for research.
  • The creation of workable models of information sharing across organisational boundaries with appropriate privacy and security protections.
  • Technology to support the storage and analysis of large amounts of data, with strong security safeguards.
  • Novel analytics to help combine diverse data sets with appropriate privacy and security protections to answer precision medicine questions.
  • New solutions for security issues in building large research data sets.

According to a White House blog post, "Over the course of this administration, we’ve seen incredible advances in health technology, including widespread adoption of electronic health records. Yet, there is still more work to do. Too many people are unable to access, share, or move their health data easily."

Leaders in healthcare, therefore, must continue to work with the technology sector on devising new methods for opening up patient data and allowing individuals to donate their data to research, according to the blog article.

"PMI will provide the foundation that allows all Americans to sign up and share their data in a safe and responsible way, leading to scientific breakthroughs that will ultimately pave the way to better options for patients," the article continues.

Researchers, healthcare providers, patients, research participants and other stakeholders are encouraged to support PMI by sharing any new activities that support its goals or other programmes that advance precision medicine. Suggestions and feedback can be submitted by 5 PM ET on 21 September 2015 via this link:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/precision-medicine#section-principles

To know more about this initiative, visit the White House Precision Medicine website.

Source and image credit: The White House

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healthmanagement, precision medicine, technology, personalised medicine, electronic health records President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative aims to enable a new era of medicine through research, technology, and policies that will lead to the development of individualised, tailored treatments for patients.