Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Four Ps represent the future of medicine
Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) claims a trademark in the term "P4 Medicine," which represents its take on the future of health care: Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory. It emphasizes improved personal measurements and personalized treatments as the key to improving health care.
As the ISB website explains, "The goal of systems biology is to fundamentally transform the practice of medicine." How will medicine change? Let's go back to the four Ps:
Today's medicine is reactive: we wait until someone is sick before administering treatment. Medicine of the future will be predictive and preventive, examining the unique biology of an individual to assess their probability of developing various diseases and then designing appropriate treatments, even before the onset of a disease. . . .
The common theme running through all of this research and its application to medicine is personalization. . . . [T]he ability to examine each individual's unique genetic makeup and thereby customize our approaches to medical treatment is at the heart of this new era. . . .
As a result of this personalization, medicine will become participatory. Patients will actively participate in personal choices about illness and well–being. Participatory medicine will require the development of powerful new approaches for securely handling enormous amounts of personal information and for educating both patients and their physicians.
(my emphasis added)
Rod Falcon, IFTF's Health Horizons Program Director, believes that the participatory aspect of the 4Ps will be significant. Health 2.0, or the growing nexus between health and online social media tools, is representative of this trend, but more is yet to come.
As Deepak Singh observes in his recent blog post,
We are still in the early days, with limited patient education, services that aren’t quite there yet, a somewhat ambiguous regulatory scenario and no clear idea of who owns what piece of information.
Over the next few years we will get a better picture of how we will become more direct players into our own healthcare and wellness. We will not only have access to resources and services, but the knowledge and a medical system that actively encourages patients to work with them in a collaborative approach to treat illnesses.
With so much potential for change, these are exciting times to be thinking about the future of health.