Precision medicine is, ironically, an imprecise term.

As it is often used today, the phrase suggests that precision is novel to the practice of medicine, and to many, it means incorporating sophisticated genetic testing into its practice.

The term can even suggest that there are now possibilities of miracle cures that were never possible before.

Sometimes healthcare organizations encourage that attitude through their marketing and advertising, but to a degree, that kind of thinking more represents hype than substance.

And while genetic testing and the information it can provide can help better tailor treatment options for individual patients, especially in cancer care, experts say healthcare executives and clinicians must be careful not to encourage false hope among vulnerable patients and their families.

Yet in a time of rapid evolution of more precise and tailored treatment options, executives and clinicians are charged with divining the difficult calculus between the possible and the practical in their precision medicine organizational structure and service offerings.

In reality, precision has always been the goal of physicians as medicine has evolved over the past couple of hundred years, says Robert Mennel, MD, director of the Baylor Precision Medicine Institute in Dallas.

"In some areas we're there. We have well-accepted tests for certain diseases that, if you're not using them, I would consider to be malpractice in many situations," he says.

However, even top-level academic medicine is still quite far away from being able to look at an individual's whole genome and predict a therapy for every disease.

"But the promise of precision medicine is there, and medicine 10 years from now is going to be quite different than it is now," he says.

One area where genetic testing is ready for prime time is in noninvasive prenatal testing, says Scott A. Beck, administrator of the Center for Individualized Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

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Precision Medicine: Integration May Be Closer Than You Think - HealthLeaders Media