Patient centric medicine

Patient-centric medicine is essentially personalized medicine, but with the accent only slightly taken off the pharmacogenomics and placed on the broader picture that essentially corresponds to holistic medicine to be discussed later. These distinctions are subtle and fragile, and it is perhaps clearer and truer to say that patient-centric medicine is a corporate strategy in the IT industry. But this is good it reflects the deep recognition by the IT industry of the kinds of principles discussed in this book. 

Furthermore, the recognition of variations across the different scales of spatial and temporal dimensions would enable the identification of shifting therapeutic targets to address both of the individual and the time variances in personalized medicine (see Fig. 1). Accurate and robust biomarkers can also be useful for the stratification of diseases and classification of patient subgroups for more effective prevention and therapy. The prediction of drug responses would in turn help avoid adverse events for better clinical outcomes. In addition, the construction of dynamic disease predictive networks derived from the analyses of omics data would allow for the transition from reactive treatments to holistic and proactive care. With the transformation from disease-centered to human-based care, the systems and dynamical models would provide patient-centric information to enhance the participation of individuals, the goal of participatory medicine. 

In summary, bioinformatics plays an indispensable role in the development of systems and dynamical medicine by translating systems biology and pharmacogenomics studies into patient-centric therapeutics. Bioinformatics is essential in finding the spatiotemporal patterns in pharmacogenomics, including the time-series... 

However, biological and medical research, and the healthcare industry, are not just about money, and certainly not just about profit. The healthcare industry has evolved because of a huge, common, collective effort, just like the human genome project. Fundamentally the healthcare industry developed with a humanitarian objective. Folk medicine, alternative medicine, and other nonmainstream disciplines typically disavow the profiteering, or at least money-pinching, aspects of national medicine, yet their patient-centric, personalized, and holistic philosophies will have an enhanced role to play in the new medicine. 

Patient safety is central to the practice of medicine. Traditional pathways to improve patient safety have included better education of patients and better training of health care professionals. In this chapter, we make the case for a nontraditional approach to patient safety in the setting of dialysis vascular access which focuses on (a) the development of a patient-centric process of care, (b) individualization of care (personalized medicine), and (c) the use of novel and safer therapies. 2015 s. Karger ag, Basel... 

On the basis of such understanding, personalized medicine should focus on the whole body system of the humans or patients as the root of the diseases so that the same disease often needs to be treated differently in different patients. On the other hand, in many cases different diseases in different patients can still be treated with the similar methods if they share the common causes and mechanisms (such as inflammation). Such methods can help transform the disease-centered medicine to human-centric care. Furthermore, expanded and novel applications may also be found for available drugs for the common therapies in different diseases with common mechanisms, allowing for more efficient usages of drugs for a cost-effective care. 

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