Some Lingering Concerns about the Precision Medicine Initiative

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The Precision Medicine Initiative was launched in 2015 by the White House, in partnership with the NIH and other federal government agencies, academic and nonprofit organizations, and private sector entities. The NIH Cohort Program will assemble a repository of genomic information along with health and other records from 1 million volunteers. The goal is to develop individually tailored, precision medicine approaches to predictive health assessments, prevention, and therapies. Although the science is promising, some larger ethical and societal concerns should be addressed, including the following: (1) lack of broad access to expensive health technologies; (2) lack of health literacy and numeracy by individuals and lack of genomics expertise by clinicians; (3) lack of adequate health privacy and nondiscrimination protections; and (4) lack of policies on the increasing use of big data analytics to make fine grained predictions about the health and behavior of individuals.