Medicine based evidence and personalized care of patients.

Overview

BACKGROUND: For the past 70- years patient care has been dominated by Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) with its emphasis on Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and clinical guidelines to standardize medical decision-making. METHODS: Critical assessment of the literature and analyses of the arguments that favor patient care based primarily on individual variability in disease risk or treatment response versus emphasis on group standardization. RESULTS: Medicine Based Evidence (MBE) is used to guide decision making for an individual patient at hand by profiling the clinical features (biology) and life experience (biography) of the patient and then finding approximate matches to the patient in a clinical library of patients assembled from diverse sources (RCTs, cohorts, registries, electronic health records and more). CONCLUSION: Medicine is transitioning from population based model of clinical care that relies on average results from RCTs to an individual-based model of "personalized" medicine. For individualized care of the patient at hand, MBE is the preferred scientific strategy to generate evidence for patient care.