The man who stood at the helm of the Duke University Medical Center for fifteen years has been recognized for his role in leading the charge for prospective medicine.
Ralph Snyderman, chancellor emeritus of health affairs, received the Leadership in Personalized Medicine Award from the Personalized Medicine Coalition Nov. 29 at their annual conference held at Harvard Business School.
"I am most proud that Duke is being recognized nationally as the leading academic institution that is putting forward the prospect of preventive health care," Snyderman said.
Personalized medicine, a component of preventive health care, utilizes a patient's genetic information to determine which diseases that person may be at risk for and provides physicians with a useful tool for making targeted treatment options based on genetic profiles.
It is part of a paradigm shift from current models, which broadly speaking, focus on preventing disease rather than treating disease after it develops. Furthering this new model was one of Snyderman's primary focuses when he served as chancellor from 1989 to 2004.
"[Current health care] is such a waste of money, a waste of people's good health, a waste of some of the best time and parts of people's lives," he said. "We should be able to do things a heck of a lot better than we're doing now."
Under Snyderman's tenure, emphasis was placed on bringing people together from a variety of fields including medicine, policy analysis and business, with the ambition of changing the way health care is practiced in the country.
"[Prospective medicine] was really initially identified at Duke, and Duke was the one who held up this banner of a prospective change in health care," Snyderman said.
He added that he is pleased that Duke's emphasis on genomic medicine and prospective health care has caught on among undergraduate students. They are the ones who will see changes in health care come to fruition, he said.
Snyderman said he is especially proud of the initiative taken by undergraduates to form the Duke Prospective Health Care Club.
Joel Burrill, a junior and the club's president, said Snyderman played an important role in getting the group off the ground.
"The ability to talk to Snyderman has let us, as an undergraduate organization, flourish," Burrill said. "He's brilliant, one of the nicest guys you could meet."
Snyderman said he was impressed by the efforts the club has made to educate the public and fellow students on preventive medicine.
"If students understand the importance of prospective health, it's about time the politicians did," he added.
Duke Prospective Health Care, which offers individualized health care to Duke employees and their families who use Duke Select or Duke Basic health care plans, represents part of Snyderman's grand vision for the future of health care.
He said current reimbursement systems punish rather than encourage people to participate in prevention programs that, for example, help people quit smoking.
Many of Snyderman's colleagues praised him for his role in elevating Duke's reputation in preventive medicine.
"Some other universities have genome centers now, and a few have centers for personalized medicine, but early scientific discoveries need to be translated into meaningful clinical results," said Dr. Geoff Ginsburg, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy's Center for Genomic Medicine. "No one is doing that translation except for Duke. And it's because of the foundation Ralph laid that we can build, expand and explore further dimensions of prospective health."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.