About
Primary care is essential for preventing and managing non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, long-term lung diseases and cancer. Many factors cause these diseases, including social determinants, culture, lifestyle, environment, and genetics, highlighting the need for tailored prevention strategies in primary care.
There are significant inequities in current prevention strategies for chronic diseases. Populations made vulnerable by social and economic policies face barriers to accessing primary care. Non-medical factors such as food security, education, and income also affect disease management. Additionally, prevention efforts are often not tailored to specific community needs. Lack of access, short consultation times, inability to integrate data from multiple sources, and a one-size-fits-all approach limit the effectiveness of current prevention activities in primary care.
PRECISion PrEvention in Primary Care (PRECISE Primary Care) will advance precision prevention in primary care. The project envisions primary care systems that efficiently integrate biological data from electronic medical records, administrative data, social data, and genomic data to provide tailored prevention plans implemented in a way that focuses on populations made vulnerable by social and economic policies.
Objectives
- Identify existing prevention tools and required data for prevention and co-design new approaches to precision prevention with patients, providers and community members.
- Develop and validate an improved tool for precision prevention that combines biological, social and genomic data that can evolve with new data.
- Conduct an implementation evaluation of a precision prevention tool in a network of primary care clinics.
Impact
PRECISE will support a more efficient, effective and equitable approach to prevention in primary care, reduce the burden on providers, and lead to early detection that will decrease costs. By integrating biological, social, and genomic data into a precision prevention tool and tailoring prevention strategies to individual needs, PRECISE aims to enhance patient outcomes through personalized care and reduce health disparities. PRECISE envisions a future where preventive healthcare is both proactive and personalized, significantly reducing the burden of chronic diseases across diverse populations and leading to a more sustainable and equitable healthcare ecosystem.