HHS secretary promotes personalized medicine at Harvard forum

The nation's top health official today called personalized medicine critical to transforming healthcare into a system that creates value, not volume.

Michael O. Leavitt, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, told several hundred people at a conference held at Harvard Medical School this morning that the Human Genome Project and its offshoots can deliver on the promise of care based on an individual's genetic makeup only if the larger healthcare sector is reorganized to reward better care for patients rather than simply more care for more patients.

The healthcare system he envisions builds on four cornerstones: electronic medical records, standardized measures of quality and transparency, prices that patients can compare, and properly aligned incentives where everyone is motivated to reach higher quality at lower cost.

"I am persuaded that personalized healthcare creates value," he said. "The goal is to have better healthcare at lower cost for every American."

Leavitt said his interest in personalized medicine began when he was governor of Utah and met volunteers involved in studies that made use of genetic information as well as extensive genealogic records kept by Mormon families. He would sometimes invite familes to dinner at the executive mansion after what he called their "poke and probe family reunions," which gave researchers more information.

Those volunteers were motivated to help the next generations in their families avoid illnesses they and their relatives might have had, Leavitt said, bringing to mind participants in the Framingham Heart Study, whom he plans to thank at an event later today. Data from more than 14,000 Framingham residents changed what is known about heart disease and high blood pressure, cholesterol and exercise. He hopes more will be discovered by sharing Framingham participants' genetic data with scientists around the world through a database launched last month.

Leavitt did some research on his own ancestors in recent days. The first Leavitt came to America in the 1620s, he said, and another founded the South Shore town of Hingham.