Toward More Precise Health Care Through Relational Mapping

Precision health seeks to personalize care by accounting for individual variation but is too often reduced to 'personalized biological' interventions. This reductionism overlooks the existential and psychosocial dimensions of health. To address this gap, this paper introduces the relatome as a conceptual framework that systematically and comprehensively records relational patterns, including how patients build trust, prefer to receive information, and approach decision-making. By extending precision health into the relational domain, the relatome makes care more precise in guiding patient experience and treatment effectiveness. As a transferable component of the patient's clinical record, it also helps providers coordinate understanding across systems and settings, preserving psychosocial insights often lost during care transitions. Unlike static genetic data, these relational patterns are updated based on patient feedback and provider observations. Realizing the potential of the relatome requires addressing five sets of implementation challenges: conceptual and epistemic, technical and infrastructural, continuity and system design, equity and participation, and evaluation and investment.