Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is medical treatment that’s optimized for each individual person. Providers take into account a patient’s genetics, environment, health history and lifestyle to determine the safest and most effective treatment option for them. In many cases, clinical and research teams will use genetic information and a patient’s own cells to guide personalized treatment solutions.

Historically, health care options have been focused on what helps most people, or the “average” person. Precision medicine allows medical teams and researchers to create a personalized disease risk profile and tailor treatment so that a child gets the best care specifically for them.

• Precision medicine is actively being used for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease in babies, teens and adults. 
• By combining complex data, researchers are able to discover new relationships between environmental factors, lifestyle choices and genes for heart diseases. 
• Understanding our genetic code allows clinicians to create genetic profiles for early and accurate diagnoses of congenital heart disease. 
• Stem cell therapy, tissue engineering and cord blood banking are all types of cardiac precision medicine that have the potential to unlock new and personalized treatment options.

At the Herma Heart Institute, precision medicine involves a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the cause and development of disease for each child. The team continues to grow and includes research scientists, biomedical engineers, molecular biologists, geneticists, surgeons, cardiologists and more. This collaboration allows the team to bring cutting-edge cardiac innovations from the research lab to the bedside and deliver comprehensive and individualized cardiac care.