HHS is looking for input on “Personalized Healthcare”

HHS released an interesting RFI recently. Here’s the summary:

Advances in medicine, biomedical science, and technology present opportunities for enabling health care practices to be increasingly patient-specific by taking into account individual differences in health states, disease processes, and outcomes from interventions. Often referred to as personalized health care, the desired impact of these types of health practices is improved effectiveness and safety of medical practices. These health benefits may be manifested through new approaches for predicting disease risk at an early time point, enabling preemption of disease processes prior to full manifestation of symptoms, analyzing the effectiveness of different interventions in specific populations based on their genetic makeup, and preventing the progression of disease and the related complications.

For the purpose of achieving a broader understanding of rapid changes occurring in the health care setting that may have an impact on the future of personalized health care, HHS requests input from the public and private sectors on plans for developing and using resources involving health information technology (IT) and genetic and molecular medicine, with specific reference to incorporating these capacities in evidence-based clinical practice, health outcomes evaluations, and research.

It will be interesting to see what responses they receive, but if you have any interest or expertise in the matter I’d suggest putting in your two cents. I’ve been on the review committee for some Federal RFIs before and I am surprised at how much the government staff learned from the responses; so, it’s a great way to teach the government something they may not know.