What is needed to provide healthcare to the whole person? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Clinical practice guidelines use study data to define how a disease or condition should be treated, while precision medicine assesses individual variation and integrates that into a treatment plan. Now what’s needed is personomics. That’s according to Roy Ziegelstein, vice dean for education at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Ziegelstein: What was left out of the discussion was individual variability based on psychological, social, cultural, behavioral and economic factors of each person and a whole variety of other factors that really define who we are. I call this personomics to try to emphasize to people that it was just as important as the genomic which is why I used this suffix omics. Personomics should be added to the precision medicine toolkit. :30

Ziegelstein notes that this facet of care needs to be acknowledged and funded by insurance companies so it can be employed by healthcare providers and integrated into care. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.