Certificate in Personalized Health Care

In 2015, former President Barack Obama launched a national Precision Medicine Initiative indicative of the shift in the practice of medicine toward more targeted approaches to disease prevention and personalized treatment within the U.S. healthcare system. As the Initiative materials explain: “Until now, most medical treatments have been designed for the ‘average patient.’ As a result of this ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, treatments can be very successful for some patients but not for others. Precision Medicine, on the other hand, is an innovative approach that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.” 

At the national level, it is becoming clear that new and currently practicing physicians are not well equipped to handle this new approach, known as Personalized (or Precision) Medicine, which asks health care practitioners to tailor patient communication and decision-making to varying levels of health literacy, and treatment and prevention strategies to other unique patient characteristics, including their genome sequence, microbiome composition, health history, lifestyle, and diet. Particularly with regard to genomics-based testing applications in patient care for inherited disease, cancer, patient stratification based on genetic risk factors, and pharmacogenomics, a new skill set is required of physicians.