Delivery of Preventive Medicine in Primary Care

Historically, medical services have been weighted heavily towards diagnostic and curative functions rather than preventive functions. This imbalance has proven to be unsustainable for many reasons, most notably the continuing rise in healthcare costs. The health care system has embraced the delivery of preventive care services in order to reduce disease and the economic burden of disease. In the last decade, the successful use of health information technologies at the primary, secondary, and tertiary preventive care levels has demonstrated the ability for public health informatics tools to improve the timeliness and quality of preventive care in a cost-effective manner. Electronic health record systems coupled with decision support tools provide a means of integrating preventive care recommendations into the clinician workflow. Disease registries aggregate cohorts of similar patients, such as by gender (e.g., women) or chronic disease (e.g., diabetes) and allow for the application of evidence-based preventive interventions to high-risk groups. Successful preventive care relies upon consumer understanding of the rationale behind specific preventive care recommendations and consumer engagement to embrace those recommendations. Similarly, the Internet and the rise of social media, Health 2.0, and mobile health (mHealth) tools hold great promise for a fuller clinician-consumer partnership to emerge. Although the application of technology to preventive medicine faces many challenges and barriers, there seems to be little question that, with creativity and care, clinicians and patients can learn to use health information technology tools to promote health and prevent disease much more effectively and efficiently than ever before.