Yesterday, 22 of April, I attended a Conference in London entitled “Health for All, Care for You” on the theme of Personalized Healthcare. The Conference was organized by Science and Business journal with the participation of the Royal College of Physicians. For memory, the Royal College of Physicians is the oldest and the most prestigious English Medical foundation, incorporated by Royal Charter in 1518.
But what is Personalized Healthcare? According to a study performed by Karolinska Institute, Personalized Healthcare is a methodology, enabled by modern genetic, biopharma, diagnostics and ICT technologies, that attempts to tailor the treatment to the individual biological characteristics of a patient or a sub-group of patients. This study, sponsored by Genzyme, Novartis, Pfizer and Microsoft, and performed in several European countries on a significant panel of individuals from health care world, shown that respondents see very high potential in this new approach to medicine but also important barriers on legal, organizational and funding levels.
Important to note is that a wide majority of respondents (80%) consider that personalized healthcare will avoid errors and improve healthcare but this will entail new cost in short time.
One of the biggest challenge identified was related with the availability and development of biomarkers where a EU effort is desired.
Important for ICT industry is that a wide majority (63%) believe that citizens should have more information on Personalized Healthcare and have access to their medical records:
I was in the panel during the presentation of the results of the study together with the Vice-Provost of the University College London – Sir John Tooke and I have been questioned by the participants on the role of ICT in facilitating the Personalized Healthcare. My intervention outlined the huge advancements that ICT bring the recent years – with the refinement of usability of ICT solutions, the efforts of Microsoft and other providers in the area of interoperability (Connected Health Framework, Common User Interface, Health Accelerators), deployment of Personal Health platforms such as HealthVault and data integration and interpretation tools (Amalga UIS). Moreover, the advent of Decision support systems in EHRs, workflow management systems and complex alert system based on business intelligence, is able to support the interpretation and use of large amount of data coming from a variety of biosensors, medical devices and therefore allow tailored healthcare. As principal barrier, I identified the semantic interoperability in Europe and the Personalized Healthcare business models. Even if we agree on a terminology set, implement it wisely as a meta-level (or as Cloud service) on shared EHRs for overcoming the semantic hurdle, the way we are attracting, rewarding health professional for using these new ICT tools is essential. The report of Karolinska Institute and the press releases from Science and Business magazine will be available very soon and I will create a link in this blog to these sources.
Dr Octavian Purcarea
Global Industry Manager
World Wide Health Microsoft