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You might find yourself wondering, just what is Precision-based care? The initiative specifically translates to the disease treatment and prevention that considers individual variability in genes, the environments, and the lifestyle for each person. Once all of this data is intricately studied and recorded, doctors can predict more accurately which treatment and preventative strategies will be a success for specific pools of people. Another question to ponder, is how precision-based medicine differs from personalized medicine, and even though there are several similarities, personalized medicine is the older and more recognized term, however many researchers prefer precision medicine over its similarly dressed sister, but people still use the phrases interchangeably.
According to the CDC, exercise and eating habits alike can all hold an effect on how patients are to be treated, outside of just traditional anatomical statistics. When it comes to identifying the risk of a disease developing patient, both the medical staff and the those involved get one to two steps closer to providing an effective prevention plan, to cut out suffering for all. If one were to contract an illness the power of precision-based care can lessen the strength of those nasty side effects that come along with it. This workflow does a lot to save the medical professionals on time and even prepare the patient for a better recovery process now, and in the long run. The vast world of precision-based medicine and care holds the potential to shape the future of healthcare, including oncology, late-stage conditions, and even everything COVID-19.
According to the FDA, Precision-based care will as good as the tests that guide the diagnosis and treatment along the way. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) tests are series of demonstrations that are capable of rapidly identifying and/or ‘sequencing’ large sections of a person’s genome and are one of the most important advances in clinical applications within the frame of precision-medicine. By using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve the flow of traditional symptom-driven medicine, allowing earlier interventions to be more successful and better tailored for personalized treatments and fuller recoveries.
In these instances, large pools of data will be collected and stored for further analytics, to better understand the potential to revolutionize the field of medicine at faster rates. While there are many posed challenges in the data storage, processing, exchanging, and curating methods to help medical professionals to better understand the vast world of medicine and all of their patients that go along with it. COVID-19 has only heightened the need for transformative and attentive care in the healthcare spectrum, especially in meeting the needs of patients nationwide, especially those who’ve taken the brunt of the virus’s effects.
To date, precision medicine has been utilized and discovered as a better fit for treating inherited diseases and other diseases that involve mutations acquired across a person’s life time, in comparison to infectious diseases. That being said, precision-based medicine and care must consider the relationships between genes and their physical manifestations on scales that range from days to even decades, from tiny molecules to a whole society of people.
Though many have found that it’s too early to know the full impact of Precision medicine on COVID-19, it’s been found that the “precision” part of the healthcare offering is aiding all realms of public health, per say, through means of identifying at-risk patients, promoting additional attempts at Telehealth and remote patient monitoring, and also improving vaccine distribution and efficacy, impacting the greater good of the public health infrastructure for all.