Personalized Medicine Literacy

Abstract

Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand health information needed to make health decisions that best suits their interest. In time, the definition evolved to be more comprehensive. Although no official definition of personalized medicine literacy exists, we can define it by integrating the personalized and precision medicine concepts, with the defining traits of the person, the citizen, and the individual as a social human being: “PHC literacy entails people’s knowledge, motivation, and competences to access, understand, appraise, and apply omics and other clinical and laboratory data and psychosocial and lifestyle information to make judgments and decisions concerning the modifiable determinants of their health and prevention, healthcare, and health promotion, to maintain or improve quality of life during the life course.” This chapter also describes and defines a new personalized communication conceptual model based on the behavioral determinants of health, attitudes, and perceptions of the citizens and demonstrates a sustainable way of increasing indirectly personalized medicine literacy by periodically assessing these factors and integrating them into the already existing health information in order to make informed public health decisions.