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Prometheus Labs Takes Steps Toward Applied Precision Medicine

If you want a glimpse at a company putting precision medicine into practice look no further than Prometheus Labs.  They make diagnostic products for personalized care in digestive disease and oncology.  I use their products to diagnose and target therapy in children with inflammatory bowel diseases (crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis).

IBD offers a nice place to see the evolution of precision diagnostics:

Early biomarker testing.  Initially we had ASCA and pANCA antibodies to discern crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.

Advanced biomarker testing. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Fighting To Keep Medicine Intuitive As Precision Medicine Takes Over

In The Innovator’s Prescription Clayton Christensen details how technology is disrupting health care.  He describes the provision of medical care as occurring on a spectrum ranging from intuitive medicine to precision medicine.  Intuitive medicine is care for conditions loosely diagnosed by symptoms and treated with therapies of unclear efficacy.  Precision medicine is the delivery of care for diseases that can be precisely diagnosed and with predictable, evidence-based treatments.  Intuitive medicine is almost entirely dependent upon clinical judgment.  Precision medicine not as much.  19th century medicine was intuitive; the 21st century will prove precise.

When we think about our role as doctors, we like to see ourselves as providers of intuitive medicine.  It’s how we were all trained – products of 20th century mentoring. And so we see of ourselves just as indispensable as we were 100 years ago.  But as medicine makes its march toward predictive care all of this will change.

There’s an endemic insecurity among the 21st century doctors: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Tension Between Physician Autonomy And Adherence To Protocols

Doctors are professionals.  But are doctors cowboys or pit crews?  Recently, physician writer, Dr. Atul Gawande, spoke about the challenges for the next generation of doctors in his commencement speech titled, Cowboys and Pit Crews, at Harvard Medical School.  Gawande notes that advancement of knowledge in American medicine has resulted in an amazing ability to provide care that was impossible a century ago.  Yet, something else also occurred in the process.

“[Medicine’s complexity] has exceeded our individual capabilities as doctors…
The core structure of medicine—how health care is organized and practiced—emerged in an era when doctors could hold all the key information patients needed in their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard work, a prescription pad, a secretary, and a hospital willing to serve as one’s workshop, loaning a bed and nurses for a patient’s convalescence, maybe an operating room with a few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could set the fracture, spin the blood, plate the cultures, administer the antiserum. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to designing medicine accordingly. But you can’t hold all the information in your head any longer, and you can’t master all the skills. No one person can work up a patient’s back pain, run the immunoassay, do the physical therapy, protocol the MRI, and direct the treatment of the unexpected cancer found growing in the spine. I don’t even know what it means to “protocol” the MRI.”

Despite all of the advancements in medicine, the outcomes and consistency in treatment and care are not as good as they could be.  Doctors are not doing basic things.  The fact that Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, spoke at one of the finest medical schools in the country indicates how much more the profession needs to go.

“We don’t have to look far for evidence. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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