The Personalized Medicine Initiative at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital and Nicklaus Children’s Health System is one of the nation’s first programs focused on precision and personalized medicine to support children’s medical care, health and wellness. At Nicklaus Children’s, we know that children are not just small adults and that every child and family deserves personalized care.
The Personalized Medicine Initiative (PMI) involves a comprehensive approach to tailoring medical management to each specific child’s individual characteristics, needs and preferences at all stages of care, including prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow up.
What is Personalized Medicine?
The idea of personalized medicine is not new. Clinicians have long recognized that different patients respond differently to medical interventions.
What's new? Transformational developments in science and technology offer promise for developing targeted diagnostics and tools for predicting who will respond to a medical therapy and who will experience side effects.
Illnesses may be rooted not only in a child’s genes, but also within environmental, genetic, social and cultural influences. This combination of factors underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to personalized medicine that includes assessment at the molecular, cellular, tissue and organ, and community levels.
Integrated into every Service Line
Cultural Competency
Patients and families do best in a care environment sensitive to cultural needs. Nicklaus Children’s is developing a curriculum for staff and trainees to support cultural competency to enhance support South Florida’s diverse patient population as well as the many international patients who receive care at the hospital.
Policy and Health Economics
Personalized medicine seeks to reduce the burden of disease by targeting prevention and treatment more effectively. By improving the ability to predict and account for individual differences in disease diagnosis, experience and therapy response, personalized medicine offers hope for reducing the duration and severity of illness and improving success rates. It may also reduce healthcare costs by improving clinician’s ability to quickly and reliably identify effective therapies.