For years, doctors and researchers have talked about a future where health care is built around each patient. But lately, many experts have started using a new term to describe that goal: precision medicine.
People often use "personalized medicine" and "precision medicine" to mean the same thing. But according to Matt Might, Ph.D., director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the shift in language says a lot about how the field has changed over the past ten years.
The institute was founded in 2014 as the Hugh Kaul Personalized Medicine Institute. Later, it changed its name to the Precision Medicine Institute. That change reflected a bigger shift happening across the entire medical field.
A shift from personalized to precision
The American Medical Association says the word "personalized" can be misleading. It can make it sound like every treatment is custom-built for one person. In reality, precision medicine works differently. Doctors use genetic and biological information to find groups of patients who are likely to respond well to the same treatment.
"Precision encompasses how we are going to get to personalized care," Might said.
At its core, precision medicine is about making better decisions with better information. Instead of using the same treatment for every patient, doctors can now look at a wide range of data. That includes a patient's genes, lab results, medical history, and other biological details. Together, this information helps doctors understand disease more clearly and choose the treatment most likely to work.
One of the biggest reasons for this shift, Might said, was the growing ability to study the human genome.
As genome sequencing became faster, researchers could see more clearly how genes affect health and disease. At the same time, computers became powerful enough to process not just genetic data, but large amounts of other medical information that had always existed but was too complex to analyze before.
Now, artificial intelligence is speeding up that progress even more. With the help of large datasets, artificial intelligence can spot patterns and treatment options that would have been almost impossible to find just 10 years ago.
These same ideas are also starting to shape how researchers think about public health, not just individual patients.
The rise of precision public health
Researchers are now using this same data-driven approach to study entire communities. This growing field is called precision public health. By combining large sets of data with modern analytics, public health experts can create more targeted programs and design policies that fit the needs of specific communities.
"People talk about precision public health because 'personalized public health' doesn't really capture the concept," Might said. "You can start to tailor approaches and policies to entire populations instead of individual persons."
For Might, the shift from "personalized" to "precision" is about more than just word choice. It reflects a real change in how medicine approaches research and patient care.
The goal has always been the same: treatment built around the patient. What's different now is the ability to reach that goal.