Is personalized medicine in your future?

The teaser at the top of a recent Wall Street Journal article proclaimed, "What does the future of medicine hold? Tiny health monitors, tailored therapies--and the end of illness." Whoa! IT-enhanced personalized medical therapy holds great promise, but we won't be eliminating disease from the face of the earth any time soon. Nature is much too smart to let that happen.

And let's face it, it's nature we're battling: Microbes are crafty little devils that continue to find ways to resist the effects of antibiotics, and genetic mutations continue to put us in harm's way. Despite these caveats, talk of individually tailored medical treatment isn't pie in the sky. This approach eventually will help us address risk factors even before a disease can invade our cells, and detect preclinical disease before it gets out of hand.

What role will medical informatics play in this brave new world? Dell, for one, is so convinced that health IT will have a major influence here that it's putting the infrastructure in place to support the use of electronic health records (EHRs) in genomics research. Dell recently donated $4 million worth of server capacity and services to support a project aimed at applying personalized medicine to pediatric cancer care.

Read full article at InformationWeek>>