Technology that will initiate future revolutionary changes in healthcare and the clinical laboratory

Future trends in healthcare delivery will focus on preventive medicine that will require integration of molecular medicine with advanced information and computer technology. Molecular medicine will shift from costly intervention and treatment of established diseases to proactive prediction and prevention of disease risks. This approach will require new informatic systems that will link large scale databanks and special programs for data mining and retrieval in bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and population genetics. The clinical laboratory will soon be able to provide powerful new molecular diagnostic tools along with multianalytic assays for expression of genes and proteins in different patterns of diseases, disease progression, and predisposition to diseases.