Precision medicine and sharing medical data in real time: opportunities and barriers

Sharing massive amounts of medical data is critical to precision medicine. The California Department of Public Health recently started to partner with certain hospitals in the state to better understand cancer trends by collecting and securely sending standardized cancer data directly to the California Cancer Registry. This initiative is the first of its kind in the United States. This has afforded the cancer registry the opportunity to perform real-time surveillance on data reported via participating hospitals, and researchers can use advanced methods to analyze these data. Other states are likely to follow California's lead. However, there are barriers to increased data-sharing efforts. How these barriers can be addressed to facilitate data sharing while protecting individual privacy, reducing the risk of data misuse, and enhancing public trust becomes critical as precision medicine moves forward.