Precision Health Initiative (PHI)

The UVA Precision Health Initiative (PHI) will support transdisciplinary research and training to optimize health outcomes for individuals and entire populations, across a wide range of complex and chronic diseases. While Precision Medicine measures genes and disease factors to help doctors identify unique disease risks and find treatments that will work best for a person, Precision Health adds assessment of environments and lifestyles and identifies treatments or prevention strategies that will work best with the fewest side effects, based on each person’s unique background and conditions. Precision Health for Populations is even broader, including precision medicine, disease prevention, and health promotion for whole communities, outside doctor’s office or hospital settings. Precision Health for Populations collects data that can identify how everyone can protect their own family’s health, and strategies experts can take to promote health and well-being at individual, family, community, state, or national levels.

Series of circles encompassing various factors that effect human individual and population health.

Precision health goes beyond precision medicine, adding approaches made possible by data on habits, lifestyle, environment, society, laws/regulations, etc. that occur outside of a healthcare provider's office. The UVA Precision Health Initiative is focused on implementation of precision approaches, specifically with communities in mind; accelerating the potential positive impact of this body of research on population level health. 

Goals:

  • Advance transdisciplinary Pan-University research in precision health for populations.
  • Train the next generation of precision health for populations scientists and support their development.
  • Develop transformative long-term community-university partnerships.
  • Study and intervene on Virginia’s health challenges in two initial focus areas: 
    • prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer in vulnerable communities
    • understanding and improving youth mental health across Virginia 
  • The PHI hopes to fund a variety of topics that will grow UVA’s national profile in Precision Health Research.
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