Towards a "4I" approach to personalized healthcare

Abstract

Personalized healthcare holds the promise of ensuring that every patient receives optimal wellness promotion and clinical care based upon his or her unique and multi-factorial phenotype, informed by the most up-to-date and contextually relevant science. However, achieving this vision requires the management, analysis, and delivery of complex data, information, and knowledge. While there are well-established frameworks that serve to inform the pursuit of basic science, clinical, and translational research in support of the operationalization of the personalized healthcare paradigm, equivalent constructs that may enable biomedical informatics innovation and practice aligned with such objectives are noticeably sparse. In response to this gap in knowledge, we propose such a framework for the advancement of biomedical informatics in order to address the fundamental information needs of the personalized healthcare domain. This framework, which we refer to as a "4I" approach, emphasizes the pursuit of research and practice that is information-centric, integrative, interactive, and innovative.

Figure 1

Conceptual model for the "4I” approach to P4 Medicine. In this model, the traditional separation of clinical care and research employing a linear approach to knowledge translation evolves to support the unification of data and knowledge generation. This model involves the shifting of Biomedical Informatics foci from current trends involving solution that are: 1) data focused; 2) specific to application areas (e.g., silos aligned with basic and clinical research or clinical care); 3) implemented using an engineering approach to the user experience which values function over form; and 4) that regularly leverages existing technologies; to a new paradigm supported by four core values: 1) information-centricity; 2) integration; 3) interactivity, and 4) innovation.