Digital health: where the individual drives precision medicine

Across the developed world, highly specialized and fragmented care rendered to large aged and chronic disease populations in a “one size fits all” approach have led to inefficient and uncoordinated care plaguing our economies and causing unnecessary harm. In the U.S., the Institute of Medicine has estimated that one third of healthcare costs are wasted due to medical errors, redundant and unnecessary care. Large investments in health information technology (IT) were to address all these inefficiencies. However, essentially made of provider-centric data processing and communication IT systems, they largely failed mainly because of business barriers to the exchange of information between competitive health care organizations. On the contrary, provider to patient health data exchange is not barred by competitive business issues. As a result, patients are becoming the de facto e-communicators of their medical histories when given the rights and new digital health tools to access and share their own health records and medical knowledge. Empowered with powerful hand held mobile devices for anywhere and anytime access to more and more personalized information based on their compiled personal medical history, experience with treatment and self-monitoring devices, the individual patient is now revolutionizing medicine towards both precision medicine and population health.