Precision medicine: Huge promise, but high health IT-related hurdles, too

In their new book, Realizing the Promise of Precision Medicine, Paul Cerrato and John Halamka, MD, take a hard look at the potential for genomic discovery and technological advances set to cause a sea change in how healthcare is delivered. "The goal of the precision medicine movement is to give clinicians and patients access to the kinds of information needed to create individually tailored programs to treat a variety of diseases and to ward off those that are preventable," they wrote. "To accomplish those twin goals will require the collection of far more data than clinicians now collect when they evaluate patients.