Precision Emergency Medicine: Setting a Research Agenda

Precision medicine—tailoring care to an individual patient by considering genomic, biologic, environmental, and public health data—has not been applied to emergency medicine, with many emergency physicians unaware of its potential. Since many patients regularly seek care in the emergency department to receive routine, non-urgent care, emergency medicine providers have robust understanding of the environment and public health issues that impact care, including social determinants of health and inequitable access to care. This setting, therefore, has tremendous potential to improve outcomes by the adoption of precision medicine that informs clinical decision making. Despite this potential, several barriers exist, including physicians being unfamiliar with methods for accessing health data, lacking the skills to interpret the data, and lacking work environments that use needed health technologies.

To address these barriers, this research will develop and publish an actionable research agenda for precision emergency medicine with patient-centered outcomes, using a consensus conference format during the 2023 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) conference.

The specific aims of the research are as follows:

• Develop a shared mental model of precision emergency medicine.
• Establish a research agenda for precision emergency medicine for the next decade.
• Identify educational gaps that must be addressed for emergency providers.

For over 20-years there has been a 1-day consensus conference held during the SAEM annual meeting that has a robust history of successfully creating research agendas for emerging topics in emergency medicine. The 2023 consensus conference will be on precision emergency medicine, with the goals of examining key catalysts, identifying implementation challenges, and creating an actionable 10-year research agenda with relevant patient-centered outcomes. The identified key catalysts include optimizing access to care, capitalizing on technology and digital healthcare tools to aid diagnosis and treatment, leveraging human-centered data to individualize treatment decisions, advancing population and global health, and redesigning provider education.

The conference will have three phases. In the pre-conference phase, eight working groups and four to five content experts will work together in the months prior to the meeting to develop the overarching research questions for the conference. During the in-person meeting, the working groups and attendees will build consensus to create the research agenda. Finally, in the publishing phase, the eight working groups will take information from the consensus-building process of the meeting, develop manuscripts that summarize relevant conference findings, and publish those findings.

The development of a research agenda for precision emergency medicine holds promise to promote needed research in using precision medicine in the emergency setting to improve patient outcomes by considering a patient’s genomic, biologic, environmental, and public health data.