Predictive, Preventive and Personalized Medicine & Molecular Diagnostics

Preventive medicine and public healthcare

Medicine and public health, recognizing the inherent interdependency of these fields, established the Medicine/Public Health Initiative in the mid and evolving forum in which representatives of both sectors can explore their mutual interests in improving health and define collaborative mechanisms to achieve that goal. The creativity participants developed six goals that they and others in medicine and public health across the nation should implement: engage the community; change the education process; create joint research attempts by clinical, public health, and preventive medicine investigators, develop a shared view of illness between medicine and public health, working together to provide health care and work jointly to develop health care assessment measures. The authors describe the six goals in-depth and explain the important combined roles of clinically-oriented preventive medicine and community-oriented preventive medicine as practiced in a model of health care delivery called community-oriented primary care in implementing the Initiative's goals. They then report recent efforts, including two in Boston and Dallas, to merge medicine and public health, and state that academic health cancer’s, which are in the process of reshaping themselves, can help themselves as well as the public by holding their key role in the effort to integrate medicine and public health. In particular, they can expand and strengthen existing training programs in preventive medicine and COPC or add these programs to their modules.