Personalized Testing: the key to Community Health Activation

Today, most industries are taking advantage of superhighways of information that ensure they can pinpoint important developments at a moment's notice and course correct in data driven ways. These actions ensure businesses are able to target and in some cases achieve outlier excellence. Average is clearly not good enough in a highly competitive landscape.?

Healthcare is remarkably different. As humans we are deeply flawed but we assume we can improve over time. Sadly time is short, especially when our health is deteriorating. Who hopes for average when fighting cancer? No one. We all want to achieve outlier excellence.

Yet healthcare has been offering average since the dawn of evidence-based care. We can do better. Given the technologies at our disposal today, we have a responsibility to move beyond average and deliver highly personally-relevant health intelligence to individuals that updates at the pace of change. As detailed below, this preferred future will rely on people, professionals and technology to form new partnerships that accelerate our health intelligence and drive robust wealth into the next era of health businesses.?

How does this happen?

Let’s quickly recap the journey to average. Whenever an individual walks into a doctor’s office, the clinician views the individual as a population in order to offer evidence-based care. Health intelligence gathers evidence from study populations and then applies it to individuals. Clinicians consider a handful of individual risk factors and offer recommendations based on clinical guidelines. This is the current era of data silo’s resulting in hyper-blunt medical care.?

Yet individuals are complex combinations of not handfuls but many hundreds of co-occurrences that collectively combine to generate functional outcomes in unique ways. Furthermore, our electronic medical records (EMRs) often lack the data that might be the most powerful in determining future life-altering outcomes. For example, data regarding our use of hair products is not typically recorded during most visits with healthcare providers. Yet over the space of 11years, 378 uterine cancers may have been the result of hair straighteners.The ?Sister Study, led by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) recently reported new findings.[1] This study tracked data on 33,497 U.S. women ages 35-74. Women responded to periodic surveys that seek to identify risk factors for breast cancer and other health conditions. Recently a link between uterine cancer and hair straighteners was detected. Sadly our current health intelligence approaches are simply too slow and too narrow to prevent tragedy in time for many of us.

Gone are the days we can blissfully remain on standby hoping that our health sciences will efficiently and effectively protect us from harm. Almost everyone either has had cancer affect their family or knows of a family which has suffered this dreaded diagnosis.?

Today science reports that breast cancer continues to affect one in eight women in their lifetime. Let’s repeat: 1:8 women!! Our mothers were subject to this prevalence. Our generation continues to suffer at this rate.

How will we prevent our daughters from suffering the same health outcomes that have plagued women for decades?

Of note, early detection is associated with the best outcomes. In the case of breast cancer, screening mammography continues to play a major role in early detection. The problem, however, is that more than 50% of women that qualify for this test struggle to insert health screening appointments into their busy lives.[2] This gap has also persisted for decades. Prioritizing personal health over family and other commitments continues to be a challenge for most. We need to do better.

Here, leveraging new technology is likely to result in the health activation needed to close these widespread gaps in recommended screening.

In fact, a breakthrough in home-based testing can provide women with a new layer of transparency into the ebb and flow of her specific breast tissue health status. In September 2022, Namida Lab, Inc. launched the Auria - Biological Breast Cancer Screening and the public has taken notice.?

Women do more than answer a simple survey, they order their own lab test. A simple home-collection kit arrives in the mail. Women conveniently, easily and painlessly collect a tear sample and use the return packaging to forward their sample to Namida Lab for analysis. A few days later, a breast health specialist consults with the individual to interpret results in the context of her relevant co-occurrences: family history, last mammogram, and much more.?

Over time as the number of women tested grows, results will increasingly become individually specific. Women and mothers everywhere are pulling up their sleeves and participating in the co-creation of breast health intelligence. It is a by women for women approach. No health expression goes to waste. Each individual benefits from all those that have been tested before.?

Year after year, more than 200,000 women in the US are diagnosed with breast cancer. Some are not lucky enough to be diagnosed early. With widespread home testing, women may move the needle themselves. Together they may ensure no breast cancer is detected at a late stage of disease. Self-directed home testing is an important contributor to personal health activation. Communities of activated individuals are more likely to complete important health screening events. Home collection restores personal dignity and agency over breast health. Together, women can eliminate the more than 50% gap in recommended care that is routinely missed today while collectively compiling the multitude of co-occurrences that matter.?

When hair products have the capacity to take a life, we need a superhighway of collaboration to uncover personal harms in time to make a difference. Home collection technologies are a critical component ensuring that personally-relevant health intelligence advances at the pace of change.

Let’s all do our part.

References:

1. Permanent Hair Dye and Straighteners May Increase Breast Cancer Risk, 2019 https://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/newsroom/releases/2019/december4/index.cfm
2. Breast Cancer Facts & Figures 2019-2020