P-Medicine
The European Project FP7 “P-Medicine: From data sharing and integration via VPH models to personalised medicine”. 6-year duration. Concluded in July 2015
The Project involved 19 clinical and research institutes from 9 European Countries.
Project Aim: to develop a platform for the personalization and management of treatment. The field of genomics has enabled treatment to become personalized for each individual patient according to his or herclinical, biological, andpsychological-cognitive characteristics.
In such a bio-psycho- social approach, focusing on bio-medical aspects is not enough.
The patient’s psychological and cognitive characteristics prove to be crucial not only for dealing with the mental sphere (to use the terminology used by the World Health Organization about the concept of health) of the patient, but also and mainly because these aspects have a huge impact on the active participation of the patient in his or her care plan, in terms of understanding the information about the patient’s condition, adherence to the care plan, and in terms of clinical outcomes which improve through a cascade effect, “increasing of psychological well-being” –> “improving the immune system” –> “improving clinical outcomes”.
The starting point for improvement is the physician-patient relationship in the communication of information and also in the decision-making process, regarding the possible care plans.
With this in mind, a tool has been developed within the project, which enables the information gathered by each patient to be examined in real time, by means of a short, project-developed and validated questionnaire. This enables the immediate creation of a psychological and cognitive profile that can be used by the doctor to personalize interaction and communication with the patient based on the resulting patient characteristics and the proposed guidelines.
Personalization embraces an all-round spectrum as recommended by the WHO guidelines: the physician is thus supported in administering personalized care extending from the clinical breast examination and throughout the physician-patient relationship.