Patient-Physician Relationship in Personalized Medicine

Abstract

Present paper comprehensively covers the patient-physician relationship, widely considered as a key factor in social care and essential for the realization of high quality health care. As the visit to the physician and the patient-physician relationship will experience significant changes in the near future, which is because of the implementation of personalized medicine into the health care system, we discuss current issues in development of this relationship. Health care professionals will indeed, make decisions based on complex biological and environmental information, as well as on the patient’s life style in the near future. Therefore, development of technological solutions for citizens and patients (e.g. so-called omics technology) will be needed to help in decision making and their implementation will demand a close collaboration of technologists, health care professionals, communication experts, and citizens. A proper development of such possibilities would eventually lead to the transfer of individual health into the domain of the individual person who would then be in charge of their own health. With the intention to educate citizens as active participants in the process of decision-making on complex questions such as genomics, information, and privacy, promotion of adequate levels of health care literacy should be pursued by a wide interdisciplinary initiative.