Handbook of Healthcare Analytics

6 Personalized Medicine

Turgay Ayer¹ and Qiushi Chen²

¹Georgia Institute of Technology

²Pennsylvania State University

6.1 Introduction

Personalized medicine (PM) refers to tailoring clinical interventions (including screening, diagnosis, and treatment) to the characteristics (including demographic, clinical, and genetic) of individual patients. Although the term personalized medicine is often used interchangeably with precision medicine, their meanings are not exactly the same (Jameson and Longo ). Although these terms are not universally defined, precision medicine is typically used to refer to treatments targeted to the needs of individual patients on the basis of “omics” (e.g., genomics, proteomics) data, whereas personalized medicine (aka individualized medicine) is a broader term that refers to a departure from one‐size‐fits‐all, population‐based strategies to interventions centered on individuals. Regardless of the nuances in their definitions, the objective in both personalized and precision medicine is to maximize clinical outcomes for individual patients while avoiding or minimizing unnecessary side effects and costs for those less likely to benefit from a particular intervention. By enabling each patient to receive improved risk assessments, diagnoses, and ultimately treatment, PM offers opportunities for higher‐quality care delivered at lower costs. As an example, this may include avoiding an unnecessary diagnostic exam as such a cardiac CT scan (as well ...