After decades of investing in achieving the lofty goals of so-called precision medicine, the field of medicine has realized that we may have been targeting a necessary, but not sufficient definition of success. “Precision health” is a far more precise term to describe our evolving efforts to use big data to tailor individual treatments for each patient.
This change is more than semantics. It reflects one of the key insights that have emerged during the last few years of intensive research and planning: Health care is no longer completely defined by the always essential relationship between medical professionals and their patients. Increasingly, patient health is being safeguarded and improved by a broad range of experts who are collaborating on the ever-growing array of questions that involve not just medicine but the social, psychological, and physical health of patients.
