The creation of an integrated health-information platform: building the framework to support personalized medicine

To advance medicine toward better evidence-based, cost-effective and individualized treatment, a new model of discovery, translation and delivery of information must be developed. This requires the collaboration of the major constituents in the areas of healthcare (i.e., patients, clinicians, administrators and researchers) and the partnership of disciplines (i.e., bioinformatics, epidemiologists, statisticians, information technologists, physicians and scientists) and organizations (i.e., drug and device companies, healthcare agencies, academic and community medical centers and information technology firms) to develop an integrative platform. The over-riding goal of this platform is to improve patient care, with the developed system enabling this by providing each of the major constituents with evidence-based and tailored information at the individual patient level.