Personalized medicine for chronic, complex diseases: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as an example

Chronic, complex diseases represent the majority of healthcare utilization and spending in the USA today. Despite this, therapeutics that account for the heterogeneity of these diseases are lacking, begging for more personalized approaches. Improving our understanding of disease phenotypes through retrospective trials of electronic health record data will enable us to better categorize patients. Increased usage of next-generation sequencing will further our understanding of the genetic variants involved in chronic disease. Utilization of data warehousing will be necessary in order to securely handle, integrate and analyze the large sets of data produced with these methods. Finally, increased use of clinical decision support will enable the return of clinically actionable results that physicians can use to apply these personalized approaches.