At 68, Eddie Shakerpour had a handful of health concerns -- high cholesterol, high levels of lipids in his blood, back pain and muscle aches. He could muster the energy for a lively video game in his living room, but he often didn't feel 100 percent.
Shakerpour wanted to learn more about his health, so he could resolve nagging concerns and feel more confident about his decisions as he approached age 70. Last year, he enrolled in a Stanford Medicine pilot project called Humanwide that demonstrated a new approach to primary care: provider teams created personalized, preventive care plans for individual patients using data from at-home digital devices, genetic testing and other sources.
Shakerpour's story is featured in the first of six video episodes following Humanwide participants and the pilot project:
As Dean Lloyd Minor, MD, and other Stanford Medicine leaders explain in the video, the idea was to design an approach to health care that is more proactive than the traditional model. Minor says:
Not only do we need to involve patients and their families much more in making informed decisions about the type of care they're receiving for the treatment of diseases -- like cancer and heart disease -- but also that approach needs to change at the primary care level. Because there's so much that each of us can do to be engaged proactively in our health and our well-being.
Megan Mahoney, MD, chief of general primary care, led the year-long, 50-patient Humanwide pilot, which was based at the Primary Care 2.0 clinic in Santa Clara, California. The first video episode captured her working with Shakerpour to understand his health -- including how the interaction between his cholesterol-lowering medication and his individual biology may have caused his muscle pain as a side effect.
You'll see epiphanies like this -- small, perhaps, but meaningful --throughout the Humanwide video series. A recent paper summarizes the early experience with the new approach. In this video, Mahoney describes its goal:
The focus of Humanwide is to consider, how can we leverage the best of the art and science of medicine that we have at Stanford and across the country and the world? Technology, genomics, diagnostics -- how can we leverage these so we are focusing on prevention and proactive care, to prevent disease before it strikes?
Photo by Luceo
