White House Asks for Stakeholder Help with Precision Medicine Initiative
The White House wants to hear from healthcare stakeholders about new activities that support the Administration’s precision medicine goals it laid out earlier this summer.
In July, the Obama Administration announced new commitments to its precision medicine initiative (PMI) that it unveiled in the beginning of the year. The initiative, which President Barack Obama touched on in his State of the Union address in January 2015, aims to pioneer a new model of patient-powered research to accelerate biomedical discoveries and provide clinicians with new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which treatments will work best for which patients.
In a recent WhiteHouse.gov blog, Stephanie Devaney, project manager for the precision medicine initiative said, “Moving precision medicine forward must be a team effort. We need all sectors to work together. We need people to actively engage in research and voluntarily choose to share their data with responsible researchers who are working to understand health and disease. We need healthcare providers to share their insight and help translate new findings into better care. And we need a strong, secure, and nimble infrastructure for health data that protects privacy, ensures security and facilitates new research models.”
The blog post continued, “Leaders in healthcare must continue to work with the brightest minds from the technology sector on designing and testing new methods for opening up patient data and allowing individuals to donate their data to research. Over the course of this administration, we’ve seen incredible advances in health technology, including widespread adoption of electronic health records. Yet, there is still more work to do. Too many people are unable to access, share, or move their health data easily.”
The White House is asking healthcare stakeholders to share any new activities that support these goals or others that advance precision medicine on its PMI website by 5 PM ET on September 21, 2015. “With support from patients, research participants, researchers, providers, and private sector innovators, we can make precision medicine a reality. We need your creativity, on-the-ground experience, and enthusiasm to realize the promise of delivering individually tailored treatments to patients,” the blog post said.
