Title : Personalized, community- and population-related health in a changing and sustainable environment through the view of Personalized & Precision Healthcare (PPH): Its impact and role in preventing disease to maximize global health
Abstract:
A healthcare ecosystem as an integrated system, is a complex network of various organizations (hospitals, medical suppliers, healthcare professionals, patients, and technology), individuals, and resources that work together, functioning within the healthcare supply chain and the clinical chain, to provide medical care and support to patients and pre-illness persons-at-risk. In this context, planetary health, inseparably bonded to human health, is defined as the interdependent vitality of all natural and anthropogenic ecosystems; this vitality includes the biologically defined ecosystems that favor biodiversity; it includes the more broadly defined human-constructed social, political, and economic ecosystems that favor health equity and the opportunity to strive for high-level wellness. Planetary health provides a perspective of ecological interdependence that connects the health and vitality of individuals, communities, populations and Earth's natural systems.
Most of the environmental factors are eroding human health and global health is determined by the interaction of our environment with the genotype, phenotype and microbiome. This interaction influences on genomic make-up and shape the operational landscape of cells and tissues. Therefore, precision environmental health is an emerging field leveraging environmental and system-level (OMICS) data to understand underlying environmental causes of disease, identify biomarkers of exposure and response, and develop new prevention and intervention strategies to maximize the global human health.
A new systems approach to diseased states and wellness result in a new branch in the healthcare services, namely, Personalized & Precision Healthcare (PPH). In this context, PPH is evolving into a dynamic ecosystem, in which diverse players collaborate to deliver more connected, patient-centred care. The priority for health bioindustry leaders is to prepare for care that is more preventive, personalized, and delivered closer to the patient.
Efforts to identify and characterize the environmental factors are today brought together under a new label, the exposomic to follow two directions. One leads to an industrial vision, oriented towards the search for targets susceptible of technical intervention. The other aims towards a critique of political and social choices in public health. For instance, risk and progression of non-communicable diseases, such as asthma, diabetes, cancer or cardiovascular diseases, crucially depend on environmental and lifestyle factors rather than genetic ones! For effective risk identification, we will actually need to integrate genetic effects with environmental exposures. Meanwhile, the prevailing focus on an individual’s genes and biology insufficiently incorporates the important role of environmental factors in disease etiology and health. A broader understanding of disease that includes gene-environment interactions would enable individuals and healthcare providers to realistically see genetics as just one of a suite of personalized and precision tools to achieve healthier living, rather than all powerful methods to reliably predict future disease!
Meanwhile, more information about a person's genetic makeup, drug response, multi-OMICS and genomic response is now available leading to a gradual shift towards PPM-guided treatment. At the same time, the social and behavioral sciences play a dual role in PPM to get integrated with the environmental factors in one and the new entity. The first is integrating information on lifestyle and exposures – demographics, environment, social support, sleep, exercise habits and the like – into a comprehensive picture of each individual’s health. The second role is studying how patients and practitioners interact with emerging PPM approaches and technologies, to gain understanding that will lead to better policies and best practices. The expanded framework for PPM would also be applicable beyond the individual for population- or community-level interventions. Those innovative analytical frameworks are required to capture the complex gene-environment interactions and their assessments via IT-supportive technologies and software.
Personalized or individualized healthcare and population healthcare are two sides of one coin. It follows that those responsible for developing population healthcare cannot ignore the individual. Looking forward, the future of PPM-driven healthcare will involve a fully integrated IT-controlled and driven ecosystem capable of providing real-time and predictive insights through continuous multimodal data analysis. Advanced technologies can help PPM firms minimize their environmental impact, making the information about all the technologies, facilities, and distribution networks involved in their products, stored in a database. Therefore, integrating environmental exposures across the life course with multi-OMICS datasets, a precision environmental health framework has transformative potential for the development of precise and effective disease prevention in most of the cases or occasions.
Healthcare is undergoing profound transformation. As empowered individuals take ownership of their health journeys, healthcare organisations must rethink not only how care is delivered but how value is created and sustained across the ecosystem. Reinvention in healthcare requires a strategic shift toward human-centric models that integrate advanced AI, data platforms, and cross-sector collaboration. This transformation moves beyond episodic care to continuous, outcome-driven engagements that prioritise healthspan and overall wellbeing.
In conclusion, global health is used as an interdisciplinary approach consisting of the interaction between globalization and the determinants of health. Meanwhile, our planet’s and its people’s health is deeply interconnected and depends on thriving ecosystems and environmental (exposomal) factors. Strengthening active collaborations between scholars, governments, international policy makers and communities will be essential to leveraging planetary health research in addressing environmental crises and building resilient health systems globally.
