Imagine health care that promotes wellness, defines disease before it is clinically manifest, and individualizes prevention and treatment strategies for each person. This is the promise of personalized health care.
Personalized health care utilizes gene-based information to understand each person’s individual requirements for maintaining health, preventing disease and tailoring therapy to their genetic uniqueness. This approach to health and disease management is revolutionary and will fundamentally alter the practice of medicine.
The future of personalized health care is one in which physicians and healthcare professionals, armed with electronic medical information and a patient’s detailed genome, prescribe treatments based on an individual’s unique genetic, behavioral and environmental factors. Patients control their own health by understanding their genetic predisposition to diseases and actively following proven approaches to prevent or postpone illness. At the same time, medications will target individual needs more precisely through understanding relevant variations in a patient’s genome, an approach that will also minimize genetic-based adverse effects. Personalized medicine also involves high-touch attitudes to patient care.
At The Ohio State University, we see personalized health care as a broader concept. It requires understanding a patient’s genotype and family health history, physical environment and health behaviors, all of which can help us tailor health, wellness and medical interventions. It also extends to creating tools to move the patient-physician relationship to health care on demand, meeting individual needs and expectations.
The Ohio State University Medical Center and the OSU Center for Personalized Health Care are committed to developing collaboration in research and development, and we look forward to interacting with academic, public, nonprofit and industry organizations to realize our promise of improving people’s lives through predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory and precise health care.
Clay Marsh, MD
Vice Dean of Research, College of Medicine
Senior Associate Vice President for Research, Office of Health Sciences
Director, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine
Director, Center for Critical Care and Respiratory Medicine
Executive Director, Center for Personalized Health Care