Dive Brief:
- The NIH has released its framework to enroll one million or more participants in a new medical record database in its report, The Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program—Building a Research Foundation for 21st Century Medicine.
- The plan is to utilize medical records, mobile device data, claims data and more to enable clinical trials and to correlate various health measures and environmental exposures with each particpant's outcomes.
- The program "will change the way we do research," NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
said in a prepared statement. "Participants will be partners in research, not subjects, and will have access to a wide range of study results,"
Dive Insight:
The program will rely on altruism and the provision of feedback in order to attract participation, NIH experts say.
"The goal is to enable a new era of medicine through research, technology and policies that empower patients, researchers and providers to work together toward development of individualized medicine," Collins writes.
NIH’s work on the Precision Medicine Initiative will focus on two areas: accelerating new opportunities in cancer genomics and developing a long-term approach to all diseases.
"We live in an incredibly exciting time for biomedical research," Collins is quoted by Modern Healthcare, because of the rise of electronic health records and declining cost of genetic sequencing. "The stars are aligning, now is the time for us to take bold action," he says.