Innovation plays a critical role in solving many of the problems the society face. It involves coming up with new ideas that bring efficiency, improve quality, and minimize the costs of doing a certain activity. One such innovation is the precision medicine that involves the medical approach to the treatment and prevention of diseases based on an individual’s variability. It concentrates on a person’s genes, lifestyle, and the environment in developing the treatment method. Precision medicine also focuses more on preventive measures rather than disease treatment (Ashley, 2016) . The paper looks at the innovation and its advantages to public health. It also suggests how precision medicine can be used during pandemics like Covid-19.
Advantages of Precision Medicine to Public Health
Improved Diagnostic Accuracy
Public health requires improved disease diagnosis to prevent deaths and acceleration of various ailments to an uncontrollable level. With precision medicine, medical practitioners can be able to carry out the accurate diagnosis of disease based on an individual’s genetic and molecular structure (Williams et al., 2016) . As every person possesses a unique form of genes, he/she will have a specific reception towards a particular ailment thus creating variation. This helps the healthcare professionals develop a particular form of treatment which will be more accurate as compared to using the entire sampling. Precision medicine also helps medical practitioners provide effective patient care as compared to the time before this innovation. During pandemics like the current Covid-19, this innovative solution can help healthcare workers develop better individual responses thus saving many lives. As different individuals have unique genetic and molecular make, their response to such diseases vary thus requiring individual-based care to overcome the ailment.
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Expanded Targeted Treatment
As people have varying responses to the treatment of certain diseases, medical practitioners need to come up with models that concentrate on individual care for more accuracy. As they adopt this method, they will be able to expand their targeted treatment thus being able to serve as many patients as possible. This is proving to be more effective in public health as many patients with varying genetic structures can be given specified care that suits their making. Precision medicine is also efficient in tackling pandemics like Covid-19 as people will show a different response to it. Coronavirus has shown that genetic structure significantly determines how an individual will respond to different ailments; some may require more critical care while others have stronger immune that fights off much of the disease. This variation will be useful in grouping patients, those in need of specialized hospital-based care, and those who can be served through home-based treatment enabling more targeted treatment.
Focuses More on Prevention rather than Treatment
Precision medicine concentrates much on preventing the disease based on the genetic and molecular structure of an individual. A person is tested before the symptoms could show thus enabling healthcare professionals to develop preventive measures based on genes the individual possesses. From the data collected during screening, medical professionals can model the type of treatment the patient will require should certain diseases occur. This is particularly more useful in tackling pandemics as the health sector will be able to develop preventive measures before it could occur. They can do this by screening and analysing the genes of each individual thus coming up with vaccines in an easier way. As most pandemics overwhelm public health service delivery, precision medicine can help in modelling its effect thus allowing the development of better response strategies to minimize its effects.
Minimizing Costs
Precision medicine has greatly helped the public health professionals to carry out expanded targeted treatment while at the same time minimizing the costs used to provide healthcare. Many public health facilities especially in the developing world may be cash strapped and it would be appropriate to adopt a system that allows saving on expenditure and offer services to as many patients as possible. As this model concentrates on the individual’s genetic and molecular structures or factors that he/she is exposed to, the healthcare providers can prevent wastage that may occur as a result of giving wrong treatment. It also minimizes costs by focusing on preventive care as opposed to disease treatment. Pandemics greatly inflate the costs of healthcare as there is a huge number of patients requiring different forms of treatment. Adopting precision medicine will greatly save on expenditure as it focuses on each individual’s condition and the appropriate care. It will also minimize costs by concentrating more on preventive measures rather than disease treatment.
Public health requires innovative solutions in offering professional care to different patients suffering from various ailments. One of these innovations is the precision medicine that focuses on the individual genetic and molecular structure to develop prevention or treatment of various diseases. This model has many benefits to the public health sector as it allows improved accuracy in diagnosis, expanded diagnostic treatment, and minimizing the costs health providers incur in offering those services. Another advantage of precision medicine is reducing the number and the effects of various diseases as it focuses more on prevention as compared to treatment. Medical practitioners can also apply this innovative solution in tackling pandemics like the Covid-19 by developing a faster diagnosis, saving on expenditures, and easier development of vaccines or curative drugs.
References
Ashley, E. A. (2016). Towards precision medicine. Nature Reviews Genetics . https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2016.86
Williams, J. K., Katapodi, M. C., Starkweather, A., Badzek, L., Cashion, A. K., Coleman, B., … Hickey, K. T. (2016). Advanced nursing practice and research contributions to precision medicine. Nursing Outlook . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2015.11.009
