Driving personalized medicine forward: the who, what, when, and how of educating the health‐care workforce

I spent most of my career as a genome scientist working on advancing personalized medicine in both academic and industry settings. For years now we have heard about the barriers to implementing personalized medicine and each discussion invariably ends with a call to educate health-care providers. The educational challenges are well known and formidable: a crowded curriculum; lack of knowledgeable faculty; lack of evidence-based guidelines; misconceptions about the nature of genomic medicine, and based on my own experience, a lack of enthusiasm by health-care providers to learn about an area that they see as invalidated and expensive (unpublished survey). Many are quick to outline the challenges, but comparatively few have offered viable solutions. Some basic questions remain unanswered: Who exactly is it that we need to educate? What exactly do they need to know? When is the best time in their training or career to be educated? How do we move forward, given the real time constraints of doctors in both training and practice?