Personalized health care (PHC) is envisioned as health care that will utilize gene-based information to understand each person’s unique requirements for the maintenance of their health, prevention of disease, and therapy tailored to their genetic uniqueness. Ideally, it also includes incorporating knowledge of their environment, health-related behaviors, culture and values. Thus, personalized health care promises to be predictive, preventive and preemptive.
The Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC) has longstanding interest in personalized health care. OSUMC’s vision statement, adopted in June, 2004 following input of hundreds of leaders across the Medical Center and community, states, “working as a team, we will shape the future of medicine by creating, disseminating and applying new knowledge, and by personalizing health care to meet the needs of each individual.”
OSUMC has made it a priority to develop a leadership position nationally in personalized health care. The Medical Center’s Strategic Plan calls for each of its six Signature Programs (Cancer, Critical Care, Heart, Imaging, Neurosciences, Transplantation) and three Support Programs (Behavioral Medicine, Bioinformatics, Genetics) to develop, support, and implement initiatives that bring personalized health care to a practical reality.
The university’s Board of Trustees approved the creation of the Center for Personalized Health Care (CPHC) in 2005. CPHC was directed to serve as an advocate and facilitator of multiple initiatives that comprise personalized health care – research, education, prevention and treatments designed to meet patients’ individual needs based on their unique biology, behavior and environment. Dr. Daniel Sedmak, executive vice dean and senior associate vice president for health sciences, was named executive director of the CPHC on April 6, 2007.
The unique advantages of the Center for Personalized Health Care (CPHC) at Ohio State include its alignment with the vision, mission and brand identity of personalized health care. Perhaps the greatest advantages of the CPHC, as compared to other initiatives across the country, is the way in which it defines personalized – a combination of genetic, phenotypic, behavioral and environmental attributes – and its conscious continuum of personalized health care, from discovery to clinical development to patient care. The end result is that there is a unique opportunity, a strategic advantage, for the CPHC in facilitating the transformation of discovery into personal health care, regardless of whether the discoveries are pharmaceutical, biologic, behavioral, technical, computational or operational in nature.
The vision of the CPHC is to see the incorporation of personalized health care initiatives into health maintenance and clinical care across the nation and around the world. Its mission is to propel translational and clinical research in personalized health care at the Ohio State University Medical Center, facilitate the incorporation of this research into patient care and educate and advocate for PHC locally, nationally and internationally.