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Opinion: Community providers will help drive the future of precision medicine

When it comes to actually delivering precision medicine, community physicians and other providers are key players.

Health care luminaries met to discuss the promise of precision medicine at a panel in Davos last month. As is typical for discussions at the World Economic Forum, the participants explored big issues — global diversity, artificial intelligence, and the ethical complexities of modern medicine.

Hearing these leaders assess the potential of data-driven medicine, I was struck by a simple fact: Mundane and subtle obstacles like insurance models, legacy processes, and siloed data are defining the on-the-ground reality for precision medicine. All of those are issues that community providers are well-positioned to address.

The science of precision medicine is already of commercially available genetic and genomic tests, plus tied to genetic markers. Physicians now have access to entirely new classes of personalized therapies that can engineer a patient’s own immune cells and turn them into treatments unique to them.

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