Background: The role of patient engagement as an important risk factor for healthcare outcomes has not been well established. The objective of this article was to systematically review the relationship between patient engagement and health outcomes in chronic disease to determine whether patient engagement should be quantified as an important risk factor in health risk appraisals to enhance the practice of personalized medicine. Methods: A systematic review of prospective clinical trials conducted between January 1993 and December 2012 was performed. Articles were identified through a medical librarian-conducted multi-term search of Medline, Embase, and Cochrane databases. Additional studies were obtained from the references of meta-analyses and systematic reviews on hypertension, diabetes, and chronic care. Search terms included variations of the following: self-care, self-management, self-monitoring, (shared) decision-making, patient education, patient motivation, patient engagement, chronic disease, chronically ill, and randomized controlled trial. Studies were included only if they: (1) compared patient engagement interventions to an appropriate control among adults with chronic disease aged 18 years and older; (2) had minimum 3 months between pre- and post-intervention measurements; and (3) defined patient engagement as: (a) understanding the importance of taking an active role in one’s health and health care; (b) having the knowledge, skills, and confidence to manage health; and (c) using knowledge, skills and confidence to perform health-promoting behaviors. Three authors and two research assistants independently extracted data using predefined fields including quality metrics. Results: We reviewed 543 abstracts to identify 10 trials that met full inclusion criteria, four of which had ‘high’ methodological quality (Jadad score ≥ 3). Diverse measurement of patient engagement prevented robust statistical analyses, so data were qualitatively described. Nine studies documented improvements in patient engagement. Five studies reported reduction in clinical markers of disease (for example HbA1C). All studies reported improvements in self-reported health status. Conclusions: This review suggests patient engagement should be quantified as part of a comprehensive health risk appraisal given its apparent value in helping individuals to effectively self-manage chronic disease. Patient engagement measures should include assessment of the knowledge, confidence and skills to prevent and manage chronic disease, plus the behaviors to do so.

Over the last decade, scientific discovery and technological advances have created great anticipation for capabilities to tailor individual medical decisions and provide personalized healthcare. Despite some advances, adoption has been sporadic and there remains a lack of consensus about what personalized healthcare actually means. This confusion has often resulted from the mistake of equating personalized medicine with genomic medicine, and thereby, attributing it as yet unfulfilled expectations of genomic medicine to the broader application of personalized medicine. The lack of a clear understanding of personalized medicine has limited its adoption within clinical delivery models. It is thus essential to reach a consensus regarding what personalized healthcare and its components mean. We propose that personalized healthcare is an approach to care that utilizes personalized medicine tools to deliver patient-centered, predictive care within the context of coordinated service delivery, and it is poised to improve healthcare delivery today.

Emerging scientific technologies provide rich sources of predictive biomarkers, which will enable the development of tools to quantify risk and anticipate disease, so health care can become rational, preventive and personalized.

The authors contend that the crisis facing the U.S. health care system is in large part a consequence of that system's disease-oriented, reactive, and sporadic approach to care, and they suggest that a prospective approach to health care, which emphasizes personalized medicine and strategic health planning, would be a more rational way to prevent disease and maximize health. During recent years, personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory medicine—that is, prospective care—has been receiving increasing attention as a solution to the U.S. health care crisis. Advocacy has been mainly from industry, government, large employers, and private insurers. However, academic medicine, as a whole, has not played a leading role in this movement. The authors believe that academic medicine has the opportunity and responsibility to play a far greater role in the conception and development of better models to deliver health care. In doing so, it could lead the transformation of today's dysfunctional system of medical care to that of a prospective approach that emphasizes personalization, prediction, prevention, and patient participation. Absent contributing to improving how care is delivered, academic medicine's leadership in our nation's health will be bypassed.

While the full promise of genomic medicine may be many years in the future, personalized health care (PHC) can begin solving important health care needs now and provide a framework for the adoption of genomic technologies as they are validated. PHC is a strategic approach to medicine that is individualized, predictive, preventive, and involves intense patient engagement. There is great need for more effective models of care as nearly half of Medicare patients age 65 and older have three or more preventable chronic conditions and account for 89% of Medicare’s growing expenditures. With its focus on reactive care, the current health care system is not designed to effectively prevent disease nor manage patients with multiple chronic conditions. PHC may be a solution for improving care for this population and therefore has been adopted as the delivery platform along with a new personalized health plan tool for 230 multi-morbid, homebound Medicare recipients in Durham, North Carolina who have been high utilizers of health care resources. PHC integrates available personalized health technologies, standards of care, and personalized health planning to serve as a model for rational health care delivery. Importantly, the PHC model of care will serve as a market for emerging predictive and personalized technologies to foster genomic medicine.