Abstract
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has continued to transform the health care system that provides men’s health care services. ACA has proposed a patient-centered, safe, quality initiative that embraces transparency from the funding of health care services to the provision of services. In January 2015, President Obama presented a proposal to Americans that focuses on Precision Medicine. For some health care providers, health care system administrators, and the lay public, precision medicine was considered an unknown entity. This editorial seeks to further elaborate on the White House’s plans for precision medicine.
Precision medicine is considered an innovative approach to disease prevention, health promotion, and the treatment of men’s health conditions. Precision medicine will integrate basic science, diagnostic testing, with the best evidence-based knowledge to individualize health education, counseling, and clinical management of complex health conditions with a primary focus on prevention. This advanced approach will take into consideration the man’s genetic profile and predisposition, environment, emotional and psychological state, and lifestyle choices into the preventive medicine plan of care.
Precision medicine leverages advances in genomics and large data sets of health information systems to further accelerate biomedical breakthroughs. The ultimate expected outcome is an improvement in individual and population-based health outcomes.
As men’s health providers, we should follow the proposed funding initiatives for precision medicine. As we continue to explore the best evidence-based practice to improve individual and population health outcomes, we should collect relevant individual data among male cohorts to explore mechanisms to improve their health. In addition, as health care providers, it is time for us to embrace and to increase our knowledge regarding the use of big data sets, population health, and genomics to develop and manage the best health care system that provides patient-centered, transparent, safe, and quality health care. In addition, our research efforts in men’s health must be patient-powered research that has the individualized patient at the core of the research agenda while using population-based health data that inform the individualized patient powered research.