Demanding Precision-Based Care in a Post-COVID Era | TEConnect Portal

You might find yourself wondering, just what is Precision-based care? The initiative translates explicitly to disease treatment and prevention that considers individual variability in genes, the environments, and each person's lifestyle. Once all of this data is intricately studied and recorded, doctors can predict more accurately which treatment and preventative strategies will be a success for specific pools of people. Another question to ponder is how precision-based medicine differs from personalized medicine, and even though there are several similarities, personalized medicine is the older and more recognized term. However, many researchers prefer precision medicine over its similarly dressed sister, but people still use the phrases interchangeably.

According to the CDC, exercise and eating habits can affect patients' treatment outside of traditional anatomical statistics.  When identifying the risk of a disease-developing patient, the medical staff and those involved get one to two steps closer to providing an effective prevention plan to cut out suffering for all. If one were to contract an illness, the power of precision-based care could lessen the strength of those nasty side effects that come along with it. This workflow significantly saves medical professionals time and even prepares the patient for a better recovery process now and in the long run. The vast world of precision-based medicine and care can shape the future of healthcare, including oncology, late-stage conditions, and even COVID-19.

According to the FDA, Precision-based care will be as good as the tests that guide the diagnosis and treatment along the way. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) tests are a series of demonstrations capable of rapidly identifying and ‘sequencing’ large sections of a person’s genome. They are one of the most significant advances in clinical applications within the frame of precision medicine. They use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve the flow of traditional symptom-driven medicine, allowing earlier interventions to be more successful and better tailored for personalized treatments and fuller recoveries.

In these instances, large data pools will be collected and stored for further analytics to understand better the potential to revolutionize medicine at faster rates. There are many challenges in the data storage, processing, exchanging, and curating methods to help medical professionals better understand the vast world of medicine and all the patients that go along with it. COVID-19 has only heightened the need for transformative and attentive care in the healthcare spectrum, especially in meeting the needs of patients nationwide, especially those who’ve taken the brunt of the virus’s effects.

Precision medicine has been utilized and discovered as a better fit for treating inherited diseases and other diseases involving mutations acquired over a person’s lifetime than infectious diseases. Precision-based medicine and care must consider the relationships between genes and their physical manifestations on scales ranging from days to even decades, from tiny molecules to a whole society of people.

Though many have found that it’s too early to know the full impact of Precision medicine on COVID-19, it’s been found that the “precision” part of the healthcare offering is aiding all realms of public health, per se, through means of identifying at-risk patients, promoting additional attempts at Telehealth and remote patient monitoring, and also improving vaccine distribution and efficacy, impacting the greater good of the public health infrastructure for all.