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Review
. 2021 Apr 6:9:561873.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.561873. eCollection 2021.

Convergence of Precision Medicine and Public Health Into Precision Public Health: Toward a Big Data Perspective

Pedro Elkind Velmovitsky  1 , Tatiana Bevilacqua  1 , Paulo Alencar  2   3 , Donald Cowan  2   3 , Plinio Pelegrini Morita  1   4   5
Affiliations
Review

Convergence of Precision Medicine and Public Health Into Precision Public Health: Toward a Big Data Perspective

Pedro Elkind Velmovitsky et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

The field of precision medicine explores disease treatments by looking at genetic, socio-environmental, and clinical factors, thus trying to provide a holistic view of a person's health. Public health, on the other hand, is focused on improving the health of populations through preventive strategies and timely interventions. With recent advances in technology, we are able to collect, analyze and store for the first-time large volumes of real-time, diverse and continuous health data. Typically, the field of precision medicine deals with a huge amount of data from few individuals; public health, on the other hand, deals with limited data from a population. With the coming of Big Data, the fields of precision medicine and public health are converging into precision public health, the study of biological and genetic factors supported by large amounts of population data. In this paper, we explore through a comprehensive review the data types and use cases found in precision medicine and public health. We also discuss how these data types and use cases can converge toward precision public health, as well as challenges and opportunities provided by research and analyses of health data.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; big data; data analytics; precision medicine; precision public health; public health; systematic review.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Big Data is the glue that brings precision medicine and public health together, allowing researchers to study interactions between comics, clinical, social, and environmental data.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Precision Medicine: few people providing a large number of types of data. Public Health: large number of people providing limited types of data.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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