what is precision medicine

Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is an innovative approach to tailoring disease prevention and treatment that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle. It is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare, with medical decisions, treatments, practices, or products being tailored to a subgroup of patients, instead of a one-drug-fits-all model. The goal of precision medicine is to target the right treatments to the right patients at the right time. Diagnostic testing is often employed in precision medicine for selecting appropriate and optimal therapies based on the context of a patients genetic content or other molecular or cellular analysis. Precision medicine focuses on targeted, personalized care using big data, and it utilizes technologies such as genomics, metabolomics, biomedical data sciences, and environmental sciences. The Precision Medicine Initiative, launched in 2015, aims to revolutionize how we improve health and research and treat disease by taking into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. Precision health is a broader term that includes precision medicine but also approaches that occur outside the setting of a doctor’s office or hospital, such as disease prevention and health promotion activities.