Personalized medicine and HIT

Donna Cusano

Federal Telemedicine News summarizes a Brookings Institution event held 28 January presenting their Center for Technology Innovation’s white paper on the challenges of HIT handling the enormous amount of medical, financial and genetic data of individuals, then turning them into usable personalized medical histories. It’s all a bit blue sky. While the benefits (cost savings, genetic testing to shape diagnoses, better informed patients) may also be enormous as promised, privacy safeguards are admittedly way behind the curve. Interoperability is vital to share/transmit information into ever-larger databases, but right now even relatively simple EHRs and EMRs don’t communicate well with each other and drop data. FTN report. The long white paper on the Brookings website.