In what he referred to as a “note on the desk” to the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mike Leavitt, the current inhabitant of that seat released “The Personalized Health Care Initiative.” Personalized health care should be an "explicit goal of health care reform,'' Leavitt said.
According to the HHS website, “The Personalized Health Care Initiative will improve the safety, quality and effectiveness of healthcare for every patient in the US. By using “genomics”, or the identification of genes and how they relate to drug treatment, personalized health care will enable medicine to be tailored to each person’s needs. Healthcare that is proactive, instead of reactive, gives the patient the opportunity to become more involved in their own wellness.”
HHS seeks to advance this Initiative through two guiding principles:
(1) Provide federal leadership supporting research addressing individual aspects of disease and disease prevention with the ultimate goal of shaping preventive and diagnostic care to match each person’s unique genetic characteristics.
(2) Create a “network of networks” to aggregate anonymous health care data to help researchers establish patterns and identify genetic “definitions” to existing diseases.
Oh well, better late than never. (The complete report can be found here.)
Hopefully there is a longer memo (perhaps with the keys to the backdoor and the security code to the secretarial washroom) on the urgent need to fund the Reagan/Udall Foundation.
Center for Medicine in the Public Interest is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization promoting innovative solutions that advance medical progress, reduce health disparities, extend life and make health care more affordable, preventive and patient-centered. CMPI also provides the public, policymakers and the media a reliable source of independent scientific analysis on issues ranging from personalized medicine, food and drug safety, health care reform and comparative effectiveness.
