Personalized Health Care and Health Information Technology Policy: An Exploratory Analysis

Personalized healthcare (PHC) is envisioned to enhance clinical practice decision-making using new genome-driven knowledge that tailors diagnosis, treatment, and prevention to the individual patient. In 2012, we conducted a focused environmental scan and informal interviews with fifteen experts to anticipate how PHC might impact health Information Technology (IT) policy in the United States. Findings indicated that PHC has a variable impact on current clinical practice, creates complex questions for providers, patients, and policy-makers, and will require a robust health IT infrastructure with advanced data architecture, clinical decision support, provider workflow tools, and re-use of clinical data for research. A number of health IT challenge areas were identified, along with five policy areas including: interoperable clinical decision support, standards for patient values and preferences, patient engagement, data transparency, and robust privacy and security.