On February 25, President Obama addressed a small audience at the White House, identifying the need for patient participation in health care and the importance of individualizing treatments for a particular patient. Obama said that precision medicine can lead to reduced costs, better care, and a more efficient health care system.  He stated “the health care system is actually more of a disease-care system in which the patient is passive, you wait until you get sick, a bunch of experts then help you solve it,” and that precision medicine is about “empowering individuals to monitor and take a more active role in their own health.” His remarks were quite genuine and showed his personal interest in precision medicine as he seemed to talk “off script” with his panelists.

A year ago the President launched the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) to accelerate medicine that delivers the right treatment at the right time to the right person, taking into account individuals’ health history, genes, environments, and lifestyles. This includes efforts by the NIH to build a 1 million-person voluntary national research cohort who will partner with researchers, share data, and engage in research to transform our understanding of health and disease through precision medicine.  It also includes efforts by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which has enrolled over 450,000 Veterans in the Million Veteran Program (MVP), a participant-driven research cohort.Vice President Biden’s cancer moonshot initiative builds on this initiative.Continue Reading President Obama Addresses Precision Medicine, Health IT, Data Access, and Security