Making Patient Care Personal
Health care is innately personal. And with the recent genomic medicine explosion, the concept of “personalization” is taking on a whole new meaning. Thanks to genomics, doctors today have an unprecedented opportunity to diagnose and treat the “right patient at the right time”– a fundamental tenant to improving health care for all. And this is just one benefit to personalized medicine. Its innovation has the potential to treat the previously untreatable and impact millions of lives.
To advance the discussion around personalized medicine, PhRMA recently kicked off an expert panel to talk about both the promise and pitfalls of this exciting field. This panel was just one part of an ongoing national dialogue in The New Era of Medicine.
During the panel, Dr. Robert Green, Director of the Genomes2People Research Program and Co-Director of the BabySeq Project, joined Lauren Stetson, a new mother and BabySeq research participant.
Dr. Green shared his opinion on how the rise in personalized medicine has impacted the doctor-patient access equation, explaining the importance of the genetics movement for patients and his belief that everyone should have access to their health information.
Genomic medicine is really launching now, and that is in part because we are seeing how useful this can be for diagnosing rare conditions.
Dr. Green’s BabySeq Project is a first-of-its-kind randomized clinical trial designed to examine how best to use genomics in clinical pediatric medicine by creating and safely testing methods for integrating sequencing into the care of newborns. The BabySeq project offers new parents the opportunity to have their newborns sequenced, provided to both healthy babies and those who are unwell.
Lauren Stetson, who participated in the project, spoke about how this gave her a personal connection to new advances in modern medicine. While she had an initial reluctance to participate in the study, Lauren praised the project for helping improve her daughter’s life by finding a rare genetic disease in time to take adequate preventative measures.
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