Innovative Health Perspectives – Personalized Health

Traditional medicine was characterized by therapies that were chosen depending on the respective disease of the patient – according to clinical guidelines. These guidelines were derived from clinical trials which pooled patients into specific patient groups. According to clinical guidelines, all patients within such a specific group should be treated in exactly the same way.

This paradigm is recently being shifted toward personalized medicine. In the future, individual treatment plans will depend on the very specific settings of each single patient, including genomic information. Searching for “personalised medicine” OR “personalized medicine” in PubMed currently yields 5944 results, almost exclusively published since 2000 with a strong rising trend.

One of the first fields of application for personalized medicine is oncology. While traditional oncological risk factors focused on populations at risk, current diagnostic tools include molecular risk factors, biomarkers, and individual cancer genome alterations. These additional data can be used to calculate a patient's individual risk profile. Additionally, they can be used to select individual therapies which effectively target on the present cancer cells.

As a next step, personalized medicine will need to be extended to a more general approach – i.e. personalized health: Although personalized medicine has a high potential in improving the therapy of many diseases, treatment is usually only the final, expensive step in a long-term process. Individual risk assessment and – subsequently – individual preventive strategies may provide even stronger impacts on our healthcare systems, if planned and performed in a suitable way. While for oncology personalized medicine is associated with genomic data, vital signs and activities of daily living may be an additional basis of personalized health systems for chronic diseases. Future decision support systems might not only propose to consult physicians with particularly important skills to select the optimal (guideline based) treatment but also propose suitable apps to support the treatment process. Personal apps could recommend, e.g. which fitness program best fits our personal preferences and risk profiles. Individual nutrition guides could help us to live on food that perfectly fits with our intolerances, genotypes and phenotypes. Such innovative tools, which address healthy citizens instead of patients, could lead us from personalized medicine to personalized health settings.

Along this path, interoperability of wellness and health services with electronic health records, quality management and integrated care will become more and more important. Active and assisted living as well as telemonitoring services can contribute data and they can build a link to patients and citizens. The present proceedings summarize interesting and novel approaches concerning these and related topics.

The 9th scientific eHealth conference (http://www.ehealth2015.at), which took place in the context of the eHealth Summit Austria (http://www.ehealthsummit.at) from the 18th to the 19th of June 2015 in Vienna, combined innovative research with state of the art applications of eHealth and health informatics within 25 sessions, including scientific tracks, workshops, round tables and demonstrations in accordance with the conference theme “from science to application and back”.

Dr. Dieter Hayn

Univ.-Doz. Dr. Günter Schreier

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elske Ammenwerth

Univ.-Doz. Dr. Alexander Hörbst

Graz and Hall in Tyrol, 7th of May 2015