Precision Emergency Medicine

Precision Emergency Medicine (PEM) leverages data and technology to deliver efficient, personalized acute care. It adapts to advancements in health data, technology, and patient needs, ensuring a more tailored approach to treatment.

By integrating environment, lifestyle, and genetic factors, PEM enhances diagnostics, treatment decisions, and patient outcomes. When implemented effectively, it streamlines access to care, personalizes therapies, and empowers informed decision-making.

PEM is not a single technology but an evolving strategy of continuous improvement across five key areas, offering limitless possibilities for the future of emergency care.

Precision Emergency Medicine Key Areas of Focus

Provide Deliberate Access to Care

  • Expand telehealth access
  • Optimize clinical care location
  • Strengthen linkages to post-acute care
 

Precision Emergency Medicine tailors care to each patient’s data and needs, adjusting treatment locations based on severity. The patient and their data remain central.

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Capitalize on Technology & Digital Tools

  • Incorporate new data sources

  • Accelerate use of novel diagnostics

  • Individualize treatments

     

Advances in technology have transformed emergency care with faster, more accurate diagnostics. Precision Emergency Medicine leverages ongoing data innovations to further personalize patient care.

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Leverage Human Data

  • Integrate data science and AI

  • Merge advances in informatics

  • Create a learning health system

  • Incorporate social determinants of health

 

Patient data is integrated like never before, creating detailed profiles from billions of data points. Machine learning compares these to similar individuals and population data, enhancing diagnosis and outcome predictions.

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Advance Population Health

  • Strengthen disease tracking and treatment

  • Inform community and public health agencies

  • Prioritize population health initiatives

 

Precision Emergency Medicine integrates social and environmental factors into care. Emergency departments aid population health by collecting data to refine risk prediction and intervention design.

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Reimagine Provider Education & Role

  • Use and interpret data accurately

  • Share decision-making with informed patients

  • Achieve competence in health data literacy

 

Adopting Precision Emergency Medicine requires educating providers in data literacy, digital health, and implementation science to enhance patient care.

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Consensus Conference on Precision EM

Stanford Department of Emergency Medicine led the 2023 SAEM Consensus Conference on Precision EM. Read about the event. The effort yielded several groundbreaking publications:

Precision Emergency Medicine 
In this far-reaching paper, 14 Stanford EMED faculty conceptualize precision emergency medicine as an emerging paradigm and identify key drivers of its implementation into current and future clinical practice.

2023 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference on Precision Emergency Medicine: Development of a policy-relevant, patient-centered research agenda

Precision medicine within health professions education: Defining a research agenda for emergency medicine using a foresight and strategy technique (FaST) review

FAQs

How does precision emergency medicine impact clinical practice?

Precision emergency medicine aims to help providers and systems become even more patient-centered. Through precision emergency medicine, we can better interpret data about our patients, helping us refine and tailor individualized clinical care.   

How does precision emergency medicine improve care?

Adopted correctly, precision emergency medicine can ensure seamless and accelerated access across healthcare settings, increased personalization of diagnostics and therapeutics, improved short and long-term health outcomes, and an increased ability for patients to make informed and authentic healthcare decisions.

Why is emergency medicine a key driver of precision health care?

Emergency physicians are uniquely suited to a broad adoption of precision health, given our understanding of the social determinants of health and the challenges of inconsistent access to care.