An Inter-Professional Approach to Personalized Medicine Education: One Institution’S Experience

Abstract

Personalized medicine offers the promise of better diagnoses, targeted therapies and individualized treatment plans. Pharmacogenomics is an integral component of personalized medicine; it aids in the prediction of an individual’s response to medications. Despite growing public acceptance and emerging clinical evidence, this rapidly expanding field of medicine is slow to be adopted and utilized by healthcare providers, although many believe that they should be knowledgeable and able to apply pharmacogenomics in clinical practice. Institutional infrastructure must be built to support pharmacogenomic implementation. Multidisciplinary education for healthcare providers is a critical component for pharmacogenomics to achieve its full potential to optimize patient care. We describe our recent experience at the Mayo Clinic implementing pharmacogenomics education in a large, academic healthcare system facilitated by the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine.

Keywords::

• e-learning
• genomic decision-making
• healthcare systems
• individualized medicine
• multidisciplinary education
• personalized medicine
• pharmacogenetics
• pharmacogenomics
• point-of-care online resources

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.