Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative seeks submissions to further vision

In a follow-up to the February announcement of the Obama Administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), the White House posted a blog post seeking contributions that further the initiative’s goals.

“We need your creativity, on-the-ground experience and enthusiasm to realize the promise of delivering individually tailored treatments to patients,” wrote DJ Patil, PhD, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s deputy CTO for data policy and chief data scientist.

The PMI vision will lead to “a new era of medicine through research, technology and policies that will lead to the development of individualized, tailored treatments for patients… and allow everyone to become an active participant in scientific discovery--furthering an open and inclusive model for better recruitment of and partnership with research participants.”

However, “moving precision medicine forward must be a team effort. We need all sectors to work together. We need people to actively engage in research and voluntarily choose to share their data with responsible researchers who are working to understand health and disease. We need healthcare providers to share their insight and help translate new findings into better care. And we need a strong, secure, and nimble infrastructure for health data that protects privacy, ensures security and facilitates new research models.”

Patil listed key areas, including patient engagement, robust APIs in EHRs, novel analytics, new security solutions and workable models of information sharing.

Submissions will be accepted until Sept. 21. Read the entire blog post.