On January 20, 2015, as part of his State of the Union address, President Obama announced the upcoming launch of the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative (Initiative). The Initiative seeks to allocate $215 million in 2016 toward a series of efforts aimed at collecting and using genomic, lifestyle and other clinical data in furtherance of precision medicine research. The response to the Initiative has been rapid and significant: in the short time since its announcement, a two-day workshop on the Initiative has been held, with working papers and presentations from multiple stakeholders, and an advisory committee has been formed to help develop and implement a significant portion of the Initiative. Viewed alongside other noteworthy developments from the past six months, the Initiative exemplifies current trends and challenges related to health technologies, data privacy and security, and biomedical research, and provides insight into the future of data -driven medicine.

Precision Medicine Goals -

Precision medicine is not new. Sometimes called personalized or tailored medicine, precision medicine is an approach to diagnosis and treatment that departs from the standard “one-size-fits-all” approach to care. Although some in the field argue that the difference between the terms “precision medicine” and “personalized medicine” is negligible, the term precision medicine has been actively developed and popularized within the last 10 years as a way to more accurately emphasize molecular-level information aiding patient diagnosis and treatment decisions. Precision medicine takes as its starting point the basic idea that an individual’s genetic makeup, environment, lifestyle and other patient-specific information may be predictive not only to the individual’s future health, but also to the individual’s responsiveness to treatment alternatives. For example, a precision medicine approach to treating a patient might involve genetic testing to help a treating provider determine which of several available therapeutic agents for a given condition will yield the best patient response. Precision medicine therefore prioritizes therapeutic and cost-control objectives by providing the best care quickly and without costly missteps.