Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS England’s medical director has revealed how personalised medicine and care in the NHS will be based on data from certain emerging technologies.
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Specifically, this will be diagnostics, genomics, data analytics and other new technologies, which will be used to identify the underlying cause of disease.
He told NHS England’s Board this week that this was the way to ensure the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time, leading to improved outcomes.
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Keogh said: “The shift to personalised medicine is already underway -our role as a system leader and commissioning organisation is to consider how this transformation can be accelerated.
“The aims of this strategy are consistent with the Five Year Forward View and the future challenges for the health system as well as the priorities for the NHS, including: improved prevention based on underlying predisposition; earlier diagnosis of disease as a result of identifying abnormality earlier; more precise diagnosis based on cause; and targeted interventions through the use of companion diagnostics to identify and stratify effective treatments,” he added.
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This signals a shift in focus, as the previous concern was on embedding genomic technologies into clinical care pathways, and genomic medicine.
