Precision medicine is set to change the way healthcare services are delivered in Norway, and eventually across the wider world as well. But with opportunities come new challenges. BigMed, the collaborative project co-managed by DNV GL, sets out the foundation for relevant, functional individualised care.
Precision medicine is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare, with medical decisions, treatments, practices, or products being tailored to the individual patient. It’s a promising development but there are barriers to implementation.
Not only a technical venture, precision medicine necessitates smart organization of knowledge and data, as the amount of new knowledge exceeds the individual capacity of clinicians and healthcare providers, challenging conventional workflows.
Infrastructure must be developed, then, to facilitate all aspects of data capture, analysis and application, including sharing and secondary use of anonymised data.
Implementation concerns politicians, practitioners, patient groups, academia and industry, as regulatory frameworks and financial incentives must be adjusted to promote an overall privacy-focused, patient-centric system, and positive socio-economic healthcare outcomes.