The most thoughtful folks in the health care industry acknowledge that the future will be defined by molecular (aka personalized) medicine. Without being infinitely tedious, it will be a matter of measuring your body’s instructions (DNA) and your present state (RNA/proteins) and prescribing a course of treatment with the most likely positive outcome and least likely negative outcome(s).
Pretty simple, right?
Well, the main challenge is that personalized medicine (PM) is all about comparing you to the history of human results. That’s right, molecular biologists know much about the concepts of DNA/RNA/proteins but they are now in deep learning mode about what causes what at a molecular level. And they are learning mostly by observation — that is, what happens to a person of type X when we do Y.
So the world of health care is collectively building a PM knowledge base and we wish for doctors to act upon it.
And while today’s knowledge base is small, if people are willing to contribute, it could swell to something very meaningful in but a few years. It’s a massively exciting time for medicine (what with the cost of genome sequencing crashing by 5X every year and cloud computing enabling global sharing of all this).
So a major impediment to this nirvana is that folks today are reluctant to share: “but what if something worse is exposed”. With worries that “existing conditions” (EC) will result in a lifelong insurance ban, it’s a reasonable objection.
Well, with a nation-wide heath care plan with EC worries removed, people will be far more open to sharing their data — which will materially accelerate our inexorable move to PM and its considerable social and economic rewards.
I offer this perspective as a (unintended?) consequence of our national health care program and progress that we all can applaud.