Small Care vs. Big Care

The scope of analysis for healthcare diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes has gradually evolved from precision care to personalized care to population health to community health to global health. Each has its own experts, ecosystems, and methodologies. However, there is disagreement about definition.

Here's a general overview of the playing field:

Precision medicine (PM) is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare—with medical decisions, practices, and/or products being tailored to the individual patient. In this model, diagnostic testing is often employed for selecting appropriate and optimal therapies based on the context of a patient’s genetic content or other molecular or cellular analysis. Tools employed in PM can include molecular diagnostics, imaging, and analytics/software.

Personalized medicine refers to how doctors and patients interact to come up with a treatment plan that suits the needs and attitudes of each individual patient.

Population health refers to the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group,” and the field of population health includes health outcomes, patterns of health determinants, and policies and interventions that link these 2.

Community health is about a group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties, share common perspectives, and engage in joint action in geographical locations or settings.

Sick-care affects different parts of these disciplines. In addition, various other social systems, like education, nutrition, socioeconomic differences, social support differences, and marital status can affect one or the other and are interdependent.

Social design engineering is a wicked problem because of the scale and complexities of one policy domain collaborating with another. Without that cooperation, however, like a balloon, squeezing on one problem is likely to make another one bigger.